Re: Guile is a great idea, but where's the community?

[Richard Todd]

Pierre Bernatchez wrote:
> Since Guile seems to have reached a certain initial level of
> maturity as a project, where can I find evidence of a thriving,
> or at least an emerging community of guile users and developers?

I agree with you that guile usage does not seem to be taking off.  I can 
give you my opinion, as someone who's watched guile on and off for a 
couple years.

I personally think guile (like scheme itself) is missing a standard 
library.  With perl and python, I have access to a wide variety of 
documented and standardized modules for any number of tasks right 'out 
of the box'.  At the moment, I'll choose one of them over guile every 
time if I need to get an application done on a timeline.

Some of it is psychological, too.  The guile projects list has many 
projects that 'froze' at version 0.3 in 2001, and many dead links.  It 
gives people investigating guile the impression that guile itself is 
dead.  I know that's what I thought, anyway.

I do like scheme a lot, though, and have recently decided to start 
contributing.  The number one thing I think we can do is start adding 
useful, documented, and (./configure && make install)'able modules to 
the project.  It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, since the easiest 
way to build a library that attracts active users is to _have_ active 
users contributing!

I wonder if it would help if I set up a place to collect stable guile 
modules, and manage the namespace so the module names and public 
function names are consistent?  It would be downloadable in a single 
tarball, with texinfo documentation, etc.  Projects from the project 
list would get promoted into the standard library as they stabilized. 
Broken projects that are no longer maintained would eventually be 
deprecated and dropped if no maintainer came forward.

People looking for a weekend project could pick a python or perl module, 
implement it in guile, and contribute it.  I don't think it would take 
long to build an impressive foundation for people who might try doing 
real work in the language.  I have a few more thoughts on how the 
library project would get to 1.0, but that can wait.

I was thinking about proposing this in January after my BASIC translator 
is feature-complete, but your mail prompted me to mention it now.  If 
this isn't something existing guile users would be interested in, I'd 
like to know asap so I can choose something else to focus on.

Richard Todd
http://www.vzavenue.net/~rwtodd5128/index.html