Re: syncase merged to master

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>]

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> While it's true I have had a bit of time lately to poke at things,
> you've been looking at R6RS syntactic integration, Ludovic has been on
> the R6RS library problem (in addition to doing great work on the GC),
> Neil does great work with the manual and on subtle bugs, Mike will bring
> us something nice with Unicode support... and then besides the past that
> we are building on, there are those waiting in the wings to hack Elisp
> and threads and persistent data structures and better Emacs integration
> and on and on and on.

And Julian did major work on SRFI-18 threads!

> It's a lovely time to hack Guile :-)

I'm pleased that you think so.  Tool-wise I think Git has been a
massive help, so major kudos to Ludovic for that.  Otherwise, I think
the main things Guile needs to encourage development are senses on one
hand of stability, and on the other of a clear release plan; so I have
tried to do what I can to help with that.

>> some kind of marketing blitz is in order. Can the FSF / GNU project
>> help with publicity in any way?
>
> I think you're totally right. FSF/GNU can help, but we need to have the
> vision -- strongly articulated, so as to cut through cobwebs of the
> past.

From a GNU project point of view, I think the vision has been clear
for a long time: an easily embeddable extension language library,
allowing GNU applications to be extended in several different
languages.  We're closer now to that than we've ever been before, I
think.

> But, and this is my perception, I think we have to be ready for the push
> when it comes. Documentation is /really/ important in that regard. As
> far as the new developments are concerned, we need to have a depth of
> documentation in place -- and already some of the stuff I wrote a few
> months ago needs updating already. 

Yes - except that I wouldn't want in-depth documentation to delay the
2.0 release a lot!  I'd rather get all the fantastic new stuff out
there.

> So I think we need to have our ducks in a row before we really start
> pushing FSF/GNU.

But what are the ducks?  Ideally I think they'd be example
applications, with beautiful and useful scripting code extending
them.  But I'm not sure how we can come up with such examples very
quickly.

Regards,
        Neil