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Re: I resign as Guile maintainer
- To: guile at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- Subject: Re: I resign as Guile maintainer
- From: Valentin Kamyshenko <val at kamysh dot materials dot kiev dot ua>
- Date: 02 Dec 1999 04:28:12 +0200
- References: <199912010422.XAA01070@savonarola.red-bean.com> <87u2m2s22n.fsf@zagadka.ping.de>
>>>>> "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.