Re: guile: going the way of DEATH

[Bruce Stephens <b.stephens@isode.com>]

Didier Verna <verna@inf.enst.fr> writes:

> Again, my view is the one of somebody discovering the package, but I
> think guile developpers currently lack feelings from people like
> me. I hope this can help identify the caveats in the project. I've
> found out about Elk after a recent mail on this list, and I
> immediately switched to it. In one day reading/coding I could do
> much more things with it than in a week investigating guile
> sources. That's the point.

I think this is just Guile's immaturity.  

I installed it as part of Gnome a week or two ago, and at the end, I
was left quite unsure about whether I'd done it correctly or not.  It
didn't seem at all clear where I was supposed to stick slib, or
whether I had to do anything else with it.

As a comparison: Tcl comes with its library, so you just do
"./configure; make; make install".  And if that's not convincing
enough, "make test".  Tk works similarly.  ("make test" doesn't test
the installation, but the installation process is a no-brainer.)

There's an ugliness with Tcl, in that many of its extensions require
that you have a prebuilt source tree lying around (so if you want to
compile Tix, you need Tcl and Tk in parallel directories to Tix).

That's nasty and unnecessary for the most part, and Guile can easily
avoid that.

There's nothing wrong with changing the interface, if there's a real
benefit to doing it: Tcl has done that recently, although in this case
the old interface is also still available.  There have been
incompatible changes in Tcl and Tk, but they've always been clearly
flagged as such.

Tcl comes with manpages covering all functions and Tcl commands.  I
don't see a problem with a texinfo document doing the same.  It would
be lots better if it were always kept up to date, of course.  (Perhaps
it *is* always up to date, and people just aren't finding the most
recent version---in which case *that* needs fixing.)

And, of course, Tk comes with similarly comprehensive and up to date
documentation.  Given the speed at which Gtk+ is changing, I imagine
that's not true of Guile/Gtk.  

I don't see any way of avoiding this kind of problem in the early
stages of development, but it's not hard to see why many people
continue to use Tcl/TK, ignoring Guile.  The influence of Gnome should
make Guile more visible.