Re: guile history: your input needed!

[Keith Wright]

> From: "Neil Jerram" <address@hidden>
> Cc: guile-user <address@hidden>
> 
> 2008/11/20 Andy Wingo <address@hidden>:
> > Hey Guilers!
> >
> > Many (most?) of you have been at this guile thing for longer than
> > I have, some of you from the very beginning. While doing some
> > reorganizations to the manual to get the VM docs in [0], I
> > realized that a big missing piece of our public narrative is our
> > history.
> 
> Apologies for not saying this when you raised this before, but to be
> honest I'm not much bothered about Guile's history.  How does it help
> us (Guile developers and users) to add this to the manual?

It can't hurt, can it?

What _would_ help us?

> (And I'm especially bored of hearing about the old tcl war yet again...)

Whatever happened to tcl?

> I hope this isn't too prickly; a better person would have said this
> better, I'm sure.  I suspect you actually have good reasons for
> thinking that this narrative will help Guile's future - so could you
> flesh those out a bit?

Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it again
and again repeatedly.

Of course we want somebody who can actually write the truth;
just rumor spreading is of little use.

A record of what the goals were and why they changed can
be helpful both for getting new people interested, and reminding
veterans what they were fighting for.

I am particularly interested in a short description of the
gh_ interface.  At one time it was billed as the new
way to call C, which would be somewhat portable.  Then
it was deprecated and removed.  What happened?

Several other directions seem to have been pursued for
a while and then abandonded.  If nobody remembers why,
then maybe someone will try the same thing again.
Maybe that's a good thing, because a worthy goal
remains to be accomplished.  It won't be if it's
forgotten.  Maybe it's a bad thing because there were
good reasons for the change, which should not be
forgotten, either.

I would want a history to document design decisions,
not just gossip.

Adding it to "the manual" does not seem to be important,
but I think it would be good to write it down somewhere.

Do you hate change logs?

  -- Keith