This is the mail archive of the guile@cygnus.com mailing list for the guile project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

Re: What's after guile-1.4? (was: Re: Questions... I am new to scheme)


Richard Frith-Macdonald <richard@brainstorm.co.uk> writes:

> On Sun, 6 Dec 1998 22:43:37 -0500, kwright@tiac.net wrote:
> > > From: Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net>
> > > > Jeff Read <bitwize@geocities.com> writes:
> > > >
> > > > I think the Guile team should pare it down a little. Make it a bit
> > > > smaller and a LOT faster
> > >
> > > The code size of guile is not any bigger than perl, python and
> > <... and Tck/Tk and so on>
> >
> > Whoa, Chill out!  Why are you telling us all this?  If anybody can
> > make it still smaller and faster, don't try to talk em out of it.
> >
> > The goal should not be "as good as <software>", but "as good
> > as possible".  When the chearleader yells "Go team" don't
> > snarl "We've gone as far as them".
> 
> Right - if you aim to be as-good-as the competition, you will always be
> slighly worse because the competition will keep improving.

That wasn't really my point. The point was, that the current size of
guile isn't really a problem. Speed certainly is, and is being
addressed, but I don't think that the size of guile is going to stop
anyone from using it, and functionality (particularly in a scripting
language) is much more important than a few k of code size. This isn't
to say that guile can't be slimmed down, but that saying guile is so
much larger than any other scripting language is a complete crock. I
say aim towards something like python, because python provides a ton
of easy to use facilities for most scripting tasks and a nice language
to boot, and I don't think that implies that we must try to be exactly
like python.

Outside of that, constantly focusing on the negatives of guile is an
excellent way to insure that no one uses it (this seems to be a
problem with the lisp community in general; we may be a bit too
demanding of our implementations, and won't hesitate to point out
exactly what's wrong without pointing out what's right). To pile
non-problems on top of the real problems just confuses people.

-- 
Greg