Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Taylan Ulrich Bayirli/Kammer]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> The music typesetter GNU LilyPond is one of the oldest GNU projects
> using GUILE.  So far, its attempts to port from GUILE 1.8 to GUILE 2.0
> have crashed and burnt (current state is inexplicable scoping problems
> and crashes in random locations).  As a consequence, it will get removed
> from Debian next February when Debian discontinues support of GUILE 1.8.
> LilyPond's lead developer (yours truly) has been banned from posting on
> the GUILE developer list years ago.  There have been few private offers
> from GUILE developers to help with the porting, but after being provided
> the necessary information, the contacts have gone dead.
>
> LilyPond is the only GUILE-based GNU project that I know of that
> integrates Scheme as tightly into the basic system and language as it
> would be expected from Emacs, defining dozens of native data types in
> C++.  And it does not even have the Elisp/Scheme discrepancy to deal
> with.
>
> It is an actively maintained project with dozens of developers and
> thousands of users and will disappear from Debian-based distributions
> next year.
>
> If Emacs developers would happen to fall from grace and/or the GUILE
> developers get tired of dealing with the expectable host of problems and
> just stop answering calls because of the initial enthusiasm wearing down
> under a lack of man power, I don't see what would promise a
> substantially different ending there.

It's unfortunate that LilyPond was hit by the 2.0 overhaul so badly.

Fortunately, such an overhaul is very unlikely to ever happen again.

And even in the fringe case that it does, it would not affect Elisp as
much (or at all) in the way the 2.0 overhaul affected Scheme.

Taylan