Re: A Forum for Guix Users

[Csepp]

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 14, 2023 at 02:10:49PM -0700, Felix Lechner via Development of 
> GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution. wrote:
...
>> 1. Our community is small, and possibly shrinking.
>
> I doubt that is true in absolute terms. You should see where we were
> 10 years ago :). Guile and Racket made impressive gains the last
> years.
>
> In relative terms we can't compete and should not aim
> to do so with either Guix or Guile.
>
>> 2. Scheme is a niche language that is not being promoted enough.
>
> Lisp will always be niche. Why would it change in half a century? The
> power of Lisp comes from its syntax - but it is a barrier to entry at
> the same time. I am always amazed they came up with that early in CS
> history.

Like I've mentioned on fedi before, advocates of Lispy languages tend to
talk a lot about what's *possible* with the language, but the truth is
that the actual tooling that matters simply isn't very good, and having
an S-expression based syntax doesn't magically make writing the kinds of
refactoring tools that Java developers have been enjoying for 10+ years
significantly easier.
For that we need good *static analysis*, and unbounded dynamism and too
much syntax magic makes that *more* difficult.
At the very least I want to be able to rename variables across the whole
project and jump to definitions reliably.

Before trying to convince me otherwise in replies, please go and try
Eclipse, or even JetBrains if you have access to it (I think it has an
open source version??), just so you know what you are up against as a
free software advocate trying to convince developers to use Scheme.
I was set out to hate JetBrains when I had to use it in uni this
semester, but I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to use.
I'm not saying this to advertise Java tools, I'm saying this to snap
Lispers out of the reality distortion bubble some of them seem to be
stuck in.

TLDR: instead of looking for excuses for why no one gets Lisp, we should
be actually addressing the complaints.  Then maybe people will start
getting Lisp.

ps.: As far as I can tell, the Lisps with good IDEs are image based, not
source based, that's why they have an easier time doing metaprogramming,
because the runtime helps a lot.  But an image based system is not
exactly in line with Guix's goal of reproducibility.