Re: FOSDEM 2016: Call for Participation

[Alex Sassmannshausen]

Hello,

I think both these topics would be quite interesting.  For the sake of
sharing my previous experience with the FOSDEM application process, we
definitely need to place a heavy emphasis on "technical" talks,
vis-a-vis "community/philosophy" talks — an earlier application for a
"GNU" dev room was turned down in part for its supposed focus on
philosophy and politics.

Don't get me wrong, I for one would love a talk on community expansion,
but we may need to think about the ordering and phrasing in the final
proposal.

HTH,

Alex

Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer writes:

> 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/