To the degree that open source projects have marketing, one of the things that has historically always come up in Guile marketing is that any language can be ex

To the degree that open source projects have marketing, one of the things that has historically always come up in Guile marketing is that any language can be expressed in Guile, therefore if only every application adopted Guile as their extension language, those apps could have any extension language they wanted. Do you like C? Then write C and have some hypothetical Guile C front-end run it for you. Do you like Python? Then write Python and have some hypothetical Guile Python front-end run it for yet. Etc. I'm not sure where that came from. Lisp advocates are (perhaps stereotypically more than in reality) known for citing that since any language can supposedly be easily expressed in Lisp, why isn't everyone running everything in Lisp and simply using hypothetical Lisp front ends to their language of choice? This line of reasoning featured heavily in Internet discussions about Guile in the '90s. "Guile should be the universal extension language because Guile can be any language" was a very common perception, at least among many vocal Guile advocates. In the last decade or so, I have not heard much along these lines WRT Guile. But in the '90s the idea that "every language can be a Guile front-end" was very much front and center in many stupid, pointless flamewars about why everyone should drop what they're doing and use Guile for everything. Just to be clear, I like Lisp very very much (and Scheme, and Guile), I'm just super allergic to hyperbole, tribalism, and wishful thinking. Ironically, thanks to Web Assembly, etc., Javascript may turn into the universal backend language that Guile always claimed to be. This is ironic because I don't think even the staunchest Javascript advocates would argue that Javascript is a better language than Scheme in any sort of idealistic, ivory tower sort of totally objective sense. Javascript isn't everywhere because everyone wants to use it, rather Javascript is everywhere because Javascript is everywhere, so that's what everyone uses. Javascript is the programming language equivalent of people who are famous for being famous. It has many admirable and interesting qualities, but it was very much a language born out of necessity than design, that lives on because it was in the right place at the right time. I say that not as a Javascript hater (I'm not) but rather as an aspiring language historian.