guile 2012

guile 2012

[Andy Wingo]

Greetings, Guilers!

I hope this message finds all of you well: you, and yours, and all the
beings in your lives.  It was really a pleasure to hack with yall last
year.

It might be useful to reflect, at the start of this new year.  We should
look back, first.  In 2011, we released Guile 2.0: a huge effort, and a
great improvement over 1.8.  More than that, I really dig the energy
around Guile now, that we are many active people, caring about where
Scheme and Guile and GNU are going.

A few years ago, Guile was going through some tough times: declining
user base, performance problems, and lack of modern features.  But in
the last year or three we have really pulled together and delivered a
great Scheme system.  So many people have applied their talent and time
to Guile that it's really impossible to make a proper list, so let us
instead raise our symbolic cup to us all.  Thanks, us!

We should also take this moment to look forward, to our challenges and
opportunities.  I'll give my impressions, but feel very free to chime in
with your thoughts.

I think 2012 will be a good year for Guile.  We'll be solidifying the
2.0 series, even as we start producing the first pre-release or two of
2.2.  I would really love to get a register VM and a first stab at
native compilation out this year.  We'll see.

If I could vote for one thing to focus on in 2012, for the broader Guile
community, I'd pick two things ;-) I'd pick Guile in Emacs, first of
all.  We have the hack power, the time is right, and we just need to
focus on the task.  By the end of the year we could have a credible,
attractive offering.

The other thing I'd like for us to focus on, in a stable-2.0 sense,
would be the guildhall.  There's some hacking that needs to be done
there, but I'm hoping to get out a first workable prototype within a
month or two, then let the meta-maintenance be driven by patches, while
the repository of modules in the guildhall has time to grow and grow.
Help here is much appreciated! :-)

As far as challenges go, I think that we can make some projections based
on the last few months of 2011.  Specifically, I think that we will need
to focus on maintain a positive, constructive environment, both for old
and new Guilers.  Some of this focus will have to be directed in the
form of patches to the documentation.  Some of it will patch code, to
make Guile more approachable and coherent.  And some of it, a very
important part of it, will be spent in consciously maintaining a good
environment on the mailing lists, and in the chat rooms.  There will be
lots of new folks, with lots of questions.  We're going to grow this
year, and we're going to have to teach the new people about our
community, and about our software.  Let's all have patience and
positivity.  With luck, next year some of these newbies will be experts.

Again, speaking personally, 2011 has really been great.  We have done
some great things, and we should be proud of them.  It sounds terribly
cheesy, but hey: let's go on and make 2012 the best year Guile has had
yet :-)

Happy hacking,

Andy
-- 
http://wingolog.org/

Re: guile 2012

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> skribis:

> I think 2012 will be a good year for Guile.  We'll be solidifying the
> 2.0 series, even as we start producing the first pre-release or two of
> 2.2.  I would really love to get a register VM and a first stab at
> native compilation out this year.  We'll see.

Sounds like a nice plan.  :-)

> If I could vote for one thing to focus on in 2012, for the broader Guile
> community, I'd pick two things ;-) I'd pick Guile in Emacs, first of
> all.

Me too!  That’s also a good chance to re-glue part of GNU together.

Other such opportunities are also worth considering.  For instance,
there are people on the GDB list discussing Guile integration (although
the reason that triggered the discussion is questionable IMO):

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gdb.announce/59

[...]

> Again, speaking personally, 2011 has really been great.

For me too it’s been really pleasant and instructive.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: guile 2012

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

Hi Andi,

On 2012-01-07T04:34:39 EET, Andy Wingo wrote:

 > Greetings, Guilers!
 >
 > I hope this message finds all of you well: you, and yours, and all the
 > beings in your lives.  It was really a pleasure to hack with yall last
 > year.

[snip]

 > Again, speaking personally, 2011 has really been great.  We have done
 > some great things, and we should be proud of them.  It sounds terribly
 > cheesy, but hey: let's go on and make 2012 the best year Guile has had
 > yet :-)

Thank you (and the other Guile developers) very much for the great work --
it's much appreciated!!

Apart from all the work on making guile itself better, I hope in 2012 also
more software to become guile-extensible -- guile-gir, guile-gdb (who knows?),
and, the holy guile -- guile-emacs.

I had a lot of fun with my modest attempts to extend my own software in 2011,
and the fun continues in the 2012.

 > Happy hacking,

Indeed!

Thanks,
Dirk.

--
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema                  Helsinki, Finland
e:djcb@djcbsoftware.nl           w:www.djcbsoftware.nl
pgp: D09C E664 897D 7D39 5047 A178 E96A C7A1 017D DA3C

Re: guile 2012

[Mike Gran]

> From: Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>
> If I could vote for one thing to focus on in 2012, for the broader Guile
> community, I'd pick two things ;-) I'd pick Guile in Emacs, first of
> all.  We have the hack power, the time is right, and we just need to
> focus on the task.  By the end of the year we could have a credible,
> attractive offering.
> 
> The other thing I'd like for us to focus on, in a stable-2.0 sense,
> would be the guildhall.  There's some hacking that needs to be done
> there, but I'm hoping to get out a first workable prototype within a
> month or two, then let the meta-maintenance be driven by patches, while
> the repository of modules in the guildhall has time to grow and grow.
> Help here is much appreciated! :-)

Hello All,
 
I was a bit reluctant to throw out my comment on the mission statement,
since lately I've been all talk and no action.  Stupid reality getting
in the way.  :-(
 
+1 for Guildhall. One weakness of Guile has been the difficulty
in finding and using quality 3rd party libraries.
 
I'd extend the Guildhall idea by also defining a way to download and build
the various C library bindings that aren't currently packaged by the distros.
Gtk, Cairo, Postgres, SDL, etc.  I think Garnome or Gsrc could be pressed
in to service. (Or Hydra?)
 
(Garnome was once a makefile-based build system for Gnome that automated
the downloading and building the whole Gnome ecosystem in a user's local
directory.  GNU Gsrc uses the same underlying system, and can be used
to download and build much of GNU.)
 
<heresy>
Also, since so many people fear the parenthesis, I'd like to see some
simple non-Lisp-like language become a supported language in Guile,
but have it be able to directly use Guile's library functions, much
like how different .Net languages use the same library.  A Lua-like
with Guile types and access to a subset of Guile functions, perhaps.
 
I know that you want to believe that if your tech is good enough,
people will learn Scheme.  For many people, that just won't ever happen.
It will always be a blocker for increasing the popularity of Guile.
 
(Did I just propose Dylan?)
</heresy>
 
Anyway, my two cents.
 
Thanks,
 
Mike

Re: guile 2012

[Aleix Conchillo Flaqué]

I feel like I shouldn't get into this discussion for my huge lack of
Guile (and Scheme in general) knowledge. But I will do in any case
:-).

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 2:37 PM, Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com> wrote:
> <heresy>
[snip]
> I know that you want to believe that if your tech is good enough,
> people will learn Scheme.  For many people, that just won't ever happen.
> It will always be a blocker for increasing the popularity of Guile.
>
> (Did I just propose Dylan?)
> </heresy>
>

I disagree a bit with this point. People will learn Gule if there are
nice libraries around it (what you said before). People is learning
Clojure and it's being using for real work, and it has parenthesis.
Ruby doesn't have parenthesis, but without Rails, may be it would have
just been another language. Now there's hundreds of companies,
freelancers that base their work in Ruby on Rails. And I'm sure
there's plenty of more cases.

I agree with the weakness of installing 3rd party libraries. I'm
afraid that's true for every language.

Guildhall will probably save Guile from being just another language
used by a few.

That was my half cent. :-)

Aleix

Re: guile 2012

[Nala Ginrut]

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On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> wrote:

> Greetings, Guilers!
>
> I hope this message finds all of you well: you, and yours, and all the
> beings in your lives.  It was really a pleasure to hack with yall last
> year.
>
>
yeah~what a great year for guile!
I agree that Guile-emacs and Guildhall have the top priority.
But the most expectation for me in future Guile would be the more complete
multi-language support. We have some nice examples now,
ecmascript/elisp/lua...besides, IIRC, the modules written by these inner
language implementations could interact with each other, which would be an
interesting feature. If someone plan to write a web-server/framework in
Guile,  it'll support these languages inherently.
BTW, I'd like to know if this feature will go further in 2012?

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