Re: guile user base

[Linas Vepstas <linasvepstas@gmail.com>]

On 27 November 2011 16:23, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I don’t have any data to answer your question.  It also seems to me that
> the Racket and Chicken communities are very active, and have good tools
> for that, such as PLaneT and Eggs.

The guile projects page is skimpy, because its not maintained: I know
of five projects using guile that are not listed: gnucash, g-wrap,
gnome time-tracker, opencog and guile-db.  gnucash has been using
guile for more than a decade, but is still not listed...

> etc.), and socially, it targets free software hackers in general and not
> just Schemers or functional programmers (I’m not arguing on whether it’s

Socially, it clearly hasn't attracted the kinds of people who insist
on volunteering to run a wiki, a newsletter, etc.  Successful projects
tend to have fan clubs of users who aren't (strong) programmers, but
fall into the class of power users who really want to promote their
favorite hobby. I don't see that guile has any of these.

One of the ways that one gets this sort of attention is brag lists of
things that you think you do really well, especially when the thing is
both arcane and powerful: the sense of leading edge, being created by
really smart people who know their shit, are mind-share leaders
(technically impressive, hip, coool, etc.)   Certainly, the racket
guys have achieved this, with their description of why they changed
the name to 'racket': they've got a bunch of new cool whiz-bang
features that sound impressive.  So, e.g. when I mention scheme in a
conversation, people who more or less don't really know what lisp is
will still say 'oh like racket', because its something they'd heard
of, seen mentioned, and read up on.  Come the day they decide to learn
scheme, for real, they'll pick the one they'd heard of before.

(guile could do this by bragging e.g. that there's a mini-javascript
interpreter or something like that on top of the guile VM and that
would impress people, even though they are neither javascript nor
scheme programmers: but they'd think it was cool, and it proves some
sort of general notion of expressiveness or power.)

> FWIW, Debian’s popularity contest shows these ranks (see
> <http://popcon.debian.org/by_inst>):
>
>  868   guile-1.8-libs
>  15462 racket-common
>  24184 libchicken5

I was going to complain about these numbers before I noted that they
were the *rank* not the number of users. So lower number == more
users.

--linas