Re: FOSDEM 2019

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello Mikael!

Mikael Djurfeldt <mikael@djurfeldt.com> skribis:

> It was a great experience and joy for me to meet some of you at FOSDEM
> 2019. Thank you all!

Seconded, that was awesome!  Meeting Guilers, both newcomers and
old-timers :-), was just great!

> Everyone who works with Guile knows that it's crap and look with envy at
> projects like Chez and Racket, right?

Actually, while there are many things I like about Racket (Typed Racket,
DrRacket, and the wealth of available libraries come to mind), I’m also
very happy with Guile and everything that’s been going on around it
lately!

Things like Gash/Geesh, nyacc, MesCC (we have a C compiler in Guile!),
libfive, Haunt, Mumi (which runs at <https://issues.guix.info>), the
picture language, the many bindings that came into existence over the
last couple of years (parted, newt, GIR, Git, etc.), and of course Guix…
I think we can all be very happy with how our community and software has
been growing!  There are many Scheme implementations out there, but few
can pride themselves on having seen this much activity lately.

I also consider it a strength that Guile is very much connected to the
practical GNU/Linux environment and not insulated like so many
programming language implementations.

The amazing work Andy has been putting into Guile to keep improving it
is another reason to be excited about Guile, this year maybe more than
ever.  I do wish more of us were joining Andy on that journey, but maybe
2019 is the year to make it happen!

So… I’m just super excited about Guile, and I bet I’m not the only one.
Chris Webber, Andy, Janneke, myself, and a couple of other people talked
about this yesterday at FOSDEM, and we agree that we must work on
increasing the bandwidth with Racketeers.  As it turns out, Chris in the
right position to do that: we almost tricked him into writing a Racket
package importer for Guix and perhaps, who knows, toying with the idea
of #lang guile in Racket.  :-)

Happy hacking, Guilers!

Ludo’.