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

[Marco Parrone (marc0)]

Richard Todd on Sun, 21 Dec 2003 13:58:32 -0600 writes:

> 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.

IMHO what is missing is code to use, libraries, IMHO it's not worthy
the fact that it is standardized or not.

IMHO an integration/compatibility with Emacs will be a great thing.

For example I'm developing a mail-to-news
(http://www.nongnu.org/mail-to-news) gateway in Guile Scheme, and I'm
finding myself implemeting almost only things already implemented in
Emacs, and now I'm considering rewriting the program in Elisp - thing
that I think will take much less time than finishing it in Guile
Scheme.  As both Guile Scheme and Emacs Lisp are good languages, I can
not justify myself the work required to duplicate the efforts.

> 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 Broken projects that are no longer maintained would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.

I think it would be a good thing to have an unofficial colletion of
libraries, specially if hosted on Savannah using CVS, so to make it
easier to share little modules too (using N projects and N webpages
and N CVS and making N packages for N very small (< 300 LOC) modules
is not very attractive).

I'm doing something similar with the (young/unstable) emhacks project
(http://www.nongnu.org/emhacks).

-- 
Marco Parrone (marc0) - address@hidden
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