Re: First look at Guile Std Library available

[Richard Todd <richardt@vzavenue.net>]

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On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 04:48:40PM +0000, Nic Ferrier wrote:
> Or, you could just contribute your code to slib.
> 

(sorry for the long-winded respose..I kind of get carried away.  I
don't think your suggestion is a bad one--it needs more consideration,
and I look forward to hearing other opinions on this matter)

That said, my thought process went like this:

The SLIB suggestion could apply to any other scheme implementation,
and yet other schemes all have libraries of their own.  I wonder why
no one has suggested that I just contribute it all to ice-9?  I would
give much the same response:

I read somewhere (have no idea if it's true, but still..) that, years
back, sales of books in America skyrocketed.  Not because the books
were better.  Not because more people were literate.  But because book
publishers paid house builders to build bookcases into new homes.  Now
people had all these bookshelves and needed to fill them!

That's what I'm trying to do for guile.  I (with some help, I hope!)
am building a large hierarchy that's calling out to be filled in.
It's built from the start to be huge.  Furthermore, it's not some
bridge to a generic library with some single-namespace'd 'require'
mechanism...it's written in guile, for guile users.  Just as people
don't buy books to fill other people's bookshelves, it seems to me
that people aren't writing much guile code to enhance SLIB.  I hope
they will want to get new code into a guile standard library.
Especially if it is organized and documented.

My hope is this helps validate guile as a powerful tool and not a toy.

This is gonna sound harsh, but if a new guile user wants to write an
extension to some program that sends emails, what do they do?  They
can search guile's core and find they can build their own smtp/rfc2822
system on top of tcp/ip.  No, thonks.  They can look through ICE-9
(once they figure out that this thing called 'ice-9' is guile's
library of modules, which isn't immediately obvious--trust me) and
come up short.  They can click on the dead links to version 0.3a of
this-and-that on the projects list (can this not be cleaned out?).  If
they persevere, they will eventually find some email stuff in
ttn-pers-scheme.  Who can tell their boss with conviction that they
need to build important systems tied together with ttn's personal
scheme library?

The basis for this project is that it should just be:
(use-modules (net email sendmail))
...or they are probably heading straight back to perl.

Richard Todd
richardt at vzavenue dot net

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