Re: Newbie thoughts on Guile Hall + Guix

[Vijay Marupudi <vijaymarupudi@gatech.edu>]

Ognen Duzlevski <maketo@sdf.org> writes:

> Have you tried Racket? If you haven't - try that and you will find
> recommending Guile to beginners to be much easier ;). On a serious note,
> there are other schemes that have their own package managers (e.g.
> Racket).

I have, but I like Guile better, and want everyone to use it :) I think
being an extension language is a very useful and important part of what
makes Guile great.

> IMHO, this learning curve is a part of learning any language. The reason
> why every language comes with a language "specific" manager is because a
> lot of people have tried to solve this problem and failed to find the
> magic bullet. At some level you are relying on the language's
> portability itself, then on the same level you are wanting to exploit
> some of the language's specifics, then on the same level someone comes
> along and says for some packages this approach doesn't work... ;)

I don't think it's fair to say that using packages in Guile just as
easy/hard as other languages. Python / Javascript make this incredibly
easy, and their ecosystem is evidence for that success. Their package
managers have flaws, but they have benefits too, and those benefits
would be great for Guile.

Note that I'm not saying that this package manager has to do everything
expected of a battle-tested production package manager. Just make it
easier for beginners to use and make packages (which will be Guix
compatible by default). And we should not underestimate what beginners
can do for a language. They might be new to Guile, but possess a lot of
other traits that would be great, like domain expertise in science,
writing skills, etc. which would be great for the ecosystem.

Advanced users can use Guix or do the ./configure && make && make
install dance.

~ Vijay