Re: FOSDEM 2016: Call for Participation

[Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer]

Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> writes:

> If there's interest in it, I signed up for a second talk about expanding
> the Guile community, kind of based on my overly-exuberant email to
> guile-devel last night.  I'm not sure if anyone would be interested in
> that!  But it's something I really care about.

This might only be tangentially related but, since we've touched the
topic of community-expansion...

I think there might be long-term value in Scheme standardization for all
Scheme implementations, and thus Guile.  I've made fine experiences with
R7RS-small so far[0][1][2][3], am trying to steer R7RS-large in a better
direction[4] (any help appreciated), and with a little more work,
standard Scheme might actually become a language essentially as usable
as Python and the like, just needing more libraries uploaded to
snow-fort.org.  Come to think of it, there's already a PostgreSQL
library written in R7RS[5], using SRFI-106 sockets[6].

While drawing in people interested in Guile directly due to their
interest in free software is probably the best thing, gaining less than
zealous appreciators of free software shouldn't hurt either.  It's also
conceivable that young programmers coming to Guile for its technical
merits (i.e. "I'll be able to write cool programs in this") would learn
free software ideals from the community, and come to support them.

If the RnRS ship sinks entirely, or steers in a totally different
direction from Guile, then I'll certainly be with Guile, because ethics
above technology, thus *GNU* Guile above Scheme, but I still think
there's some mutual benefit to be had.

Just my couple cents.

Taylan


[0] https://github.com/taylanub/scheme-srfis
[1] https://github.com/taylanub/scheme-bytestructures
[2] https://github.com/larcenists/larceny/tree/master/tools/R6RS
[3] https://github.com/TaylanUB/srfi-123 (code in srfi/ dir)

[4] http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-126/ and think of working on a
delimited continuations SRFI inspired by Guile's API soon, and more to
come.  (By the way, yes, a new hash tables spec was sadly necessary, but
it just expands the R6RS one really.)

[5] https://github.com/ktakashi/r7rs-postgresql
[6] http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-106/