Re: my latest blog post

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Hi Catonano,

> Andy Wingo has a post in which he lists tasks he'd lie to be implemented on
> Guile, many of them have to do with the file format of the compiled files.
>
> Some love should go to the quality of the experience too, not only to the
> tech issues

These are very closely linked.  I mention this because it may not be
obvious to people like myself who don’t work on compilers.

FWIW, people *are* working on improving the experience of programming
with Guile.  Some do this by working on Geiser, others by writing
libraries that are well-suited for exploratory programming with Geiser,
etc.

> Mark wrote to Fis in that thread on the Guile mailing list that in order to
> have better error messages, the compiler should be modified (and that would
> be an awful lot of work)

Exactly.  Please note that the compiler is currently being modified, so
it is not a good idea to start other big architectural changes right
now.

> I just think that the problem deserves to be mapped out so that people know
> what they're getting into

Certainly.  We cannot demand of other people to do this work for us,
though.  If you follow guile-devel you will also see that some compiler
changes have resulted in certain regressions, which are debugged,
addressed, and ultimately fixed.  Losing certain means of debugging
things would also be considered a regression, and they can generally be
handled in the same way.

Andy’s time is still limited.  What other people can do is discuss
*specific* cases on guile-devel and work towards a solution.  But please
do not demand of others to explain everything in detail.  (I’m directing
this at everyone who heeds my advice to go to guile-devel, not at any
one person in particular.)  In order to have a positive impact you also
need to learn enough about the state of the art to ensure that the
discussions can be productive.

For compiler design I have a lot of things to read before being able to
contribute meaningfully to a discussion; all I can do is record
instances where Guile produces poor error messages and try to figure out
what led to this outcome.  Once I’ve done my work I can share this with
other developers and get their input.


Some final remarks:

I should say that I’m rather unhappy with your labelling of the Guile
community as “toxic” or “full of jerks”.  This has not been my
experience at all, neither in my communications with the maintainers,
nor in the response to my modest contributions.

I will say that it is a rather quiet community, though.  What you called
“the silent treatment” is just silence, which is occasionally punctured
by helpful comments.  As a co-maintainer of Guix I would feel very
uncomfortable if my replying to some (but not all) emails would be
construed as an act of aggression, or really any kind of silent attempt
at communicating something.  In that case I’d much rather *not* respond
to any emails.

With regards to the shouting match on #guile that you linked in your
blog post, I can only say that I would have likely stepped in had this
happened when I was around.  Textual communication certainly should not
reach these levels of apparent aggression.

--
Ricardo