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The Guile vaporware was the first time I really lost respect for Stallman and the FSF. It's incredibly damaging to say "don't use TCL use Guile instead" and the
by NelsonMinar 10y ago
The Guile vaporware was the first time I really lost respect for Stallman and the FSF. It's incredibly damaging to say "don't use TCL use Guile instead" and then never actually produce a useful Guile product. A similar pattern happened in the same timeframe with the Hurd kernel.
I have an enormous amount of respect for the FSF. But it has been most effective when it has working code, like gcc or emacs. The political pronouncements not backed up by working code were actively harmful.
- dleslie 10y agoIIRC, GnuCash and LilyPond use Guile. The project itself now has some good maintainers, and has been making strides since its 2.0 release. Some parts of the (small) Scheme community have taken notice, and new projects are popping up; like GNU Artanis[0]. Oh ah, and there's Guix[1]. 0: http://web-artanis.com/ http://web-artanis.com/ 1: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/
- andrewflnr 10y agoGimp also uses Guile, I believe.
- groovy2shoes 10y agoThe Gimp uses TinySCHEME, actually (it used to use SIOD, iirc, but was replaced with TinySCHEME a while back).
- cafard 10y agoIndeed. The one actual production use I have made of Scheme was in the Gimp--I couldn't get Python-fu to work.
- gkya 10y agoIIRC Gimp was invented even before GTK (i.e. Gimp ToolKit).
- groovy2shoes 10y agoFor a long time -- until Andy Wingo took over development -- Guile was kind of a joke of a Scheme. It was horrendously slow and buggy, and it was updated very infrequently. Since Andy took over, it's quickly become one of the better choices for Scheme. Guile 2.0 is solid and reasonably fast. The 2.2 release is shaping up to be even better and even faster. Andy has done a great job with it, and he keeps his blog[0] updated with a lot of interesting posts about Guile internals and development. [0]: http://wingolog.org/ http://wingolog.org/
- Drdrdrq 10y agoThanks for the link, interesting blog!
- NelsonMinar 10y agoI appreciate the irony that TCL is basically a dead end but Guile development continues. Thanks for giving context for why!
- digi_owl 10y agoMany FSF projects that are not clones of other projects tend to get bogged down in getting it right in the MIT sense. Thats why a plucky student from Finland managed to steal their thunder by getting a monolithic kernel out there while the FSF was trying to get that microkernel working for the Nth time.
- dleslie 10y agoIn the absence of other imperatives, financial or deadlines, it's easy to become overly-concerned with style and purity. And then you never stop bike-shedding.
- davexunit 10y agoI guess it took awhile, but Guile is quite a capable programming language and VM platform these days. I have hacked on package managers, web applications, game engines, static site generators, and more with Guile. It's a really wonderful project that is only getting better. http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/ http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/