Re: the viability of translators, and Guile itself

[Greg Badros <gjb@cs.washington.edu>]

Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes:

<snip>

> However, one of the goals of Guile is to be a focal point for the
> fragmented Scheme community.  Rather than having dozens of hackers
> invest their time in dozens of Scheme implementations, if we can have
> one which people *believe* will become ubiquitous, that's a major
> service to the community.  That's why the endorsement of the FSF and
> GNOME are so important to Guile.

Agreed completely, but...

> 
> >From that point of view, the immediate quality of the implementation
> isn't so important, as long as there's a consensus to work together on
> improving it.  That consensus doesn't exist now, but I think we can

the quality of implementation can go a long way towards building that
consensus, though!  We need to make it less likely for a person to have
any second thoughts about using Guile instead of SCM, STk, Elk,
mzscheme/Dr.Scheme, etc.

> build it.  I believe there exists a clear path, a set of specific
> changes, that we can follow to make Guile a more attractive extension
> language than Tcl/Tk or Python.  That path involves real
> documentation, a source-level debugger, Guile/GTK, GOOPS, generational
> GC, and internationalization.  These are all projects in progress now,
> or soon to be in progress.  (Stallman says he has money to hire
> someone to rewrite the Guile manual.)

These are all hugely important goals that we need to be able to follow
better and that should be better publicized.  In particular, the
documentation project must happen now!  If RMS has money to pay for the
authoring of the manual, then the FSF should be taking applications
ASAP.

<snip>

Greg