Re: the future of Guile

[Roland Orre]

On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 10:01 +0100, Marco Maggi wrote:
> Pre-answer to all: the most important thing is to make clear
> what are  the priorities.  With a  "language for extensions"
> (LFE)   there  are  certain   priorities,  with   a  "Scheme
> implementation"  (SI) there are  others. I  fear that  if no
> choice is made Guile will be wiped out by other Schemes.

I agree with Marco, that the reason for choosing a particular
language is essential. My choice of guile is based upon my
earlier choice of scm (Aubrey Jaffer) as extension language as
scm was the basis for guile.

At that time (early 90ies) I wanted a small and efficient scheme
with a simple C interface. The choices were basically between ELK
and scm as I remember, but as I remember scm had much better
performance and some other benefits.

My strategy is to write the high level scripts in scheme and
heavy number crunching (data mining) stuff in C. For this purpose
scm and later guile has served very well.

Today, however, I find that there are nearly no extension
libraries available for guile. As a shell scripting language
I prefer python because it has a very simple and clean
shell interface. To extend my applications beyond real number
crunching with e.g. graphical interphases (currently working
with xlib...) I feel a limitation and have more and more often
looked upon python where a lot of libraries are available for
GUI, database and you name it.

However, I like scheme and I think I ideally would like an
environment where I could use scheme,C and python arbitrarily.
I consider that scheme is a much cleaner language than e.g. python,
and have several advantages.

How about setting up a voting/wishing site to collect wishes for
our visions and desires about guile, and in what way we can
contribute to this? For my own I haven't done much, I added the
sorting routines a few years ago and the first apropos function
but if there was a way to make a "language independent" nucleus
where applications could easily be written in e.g. scheme,
python or possible other popular langauges like ruby I could
possibly contribute to this.

Could e.g. the goops package be used for implementation of a
common object structure as python?

OK, it is not for granted that a multi language platform
may be optimal, other ideas?

/Roland