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Re: I resign as Guile maintainer


>>>>> "Marius" == Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de> writes:

Marius> This is mixed news for the Guile project.  In one way it is
Marius> bad.  You have been a very good maintainer.  In fact, there
Marius> are no persons in my mind right now that could have done a
Marius> better job.  In another way, it is good news because it is a
Marius> clear signal that something is wrong with the Guile project
Marius> and that something needs to happen.

I just  want to present here  the "outside" point  of  view. I did not
contribute to the guile project,  and do not have enough qualification
to discuss the internals of guile. I'm a physicist, and my interest in
guile is very "applied": I like scheme, and I want to use scheme-based
extension language in my work. Surely, you, people, who contributed to
the project, may have better vision of its strong and weak points, and
you do not praise  yourself by evident reasons.  So, let me do that: I
want to  stress,  that   from the  "point  of   view of the   external
observer", the progress in guile development during past 1.5 years was
very  impressive  (by the  way,  let me express  my  gratitudes to Jim
Blandy in this connection). Just few random "pluses",  that came to my
mind: it  became  much more stable;  it  starts much faster now;  it's
module system is much more convenient to use  that 'require in slib; I
practically   do  not    need slib   anymore,  because  `format'   and
`getopt-long' are now present in (ice-9) module; now  I can use `keys'
and  `optional   arguments'; I  do not  know,  how  disastrous dynamic
loading is from the point of view of it's creator :), but it perfectly
works for me; I do not have problems with extending guile using SMOBs;
I use scwm as the window manager more than a  year, and I really think
it is better  that anything   else:);  finally, the new GOOPS   system
allowed me  to forget about gcl   (whose stability, by   the way, is a
nightmare  in comparison with guile),  that I  used for small symbolic
computations and calculations with rational numbers.

Frankly, again not going into internals of the guile, I think, in it's
present  state  it  is perfectly  competitive with    tcl/tk, perl, or
python. IMO, there will be  a lot of people who  will choose it as the
extention language, as soon as a good manual (or just a good reference
guide) will be written.  I'm sure, this is much more important for the
future  of  the  project that   the  best  improvements of  the  code,
achievement of  better  performance  and so on   -  for the  extension
language good performance is not critical; good documentation - is.

IMO, it would be a sad mistake to stop the project.

--
Best regards,
	Valentin.

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