Re: Worth investing in Guile?

[rm]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 06:44:09PM -0400, Max Polk wrote:
> Just as I beginning to get started adding guile support to my 
> application, a colleague provided a contrary view of the usefulness of 
> guile.  It all started out with an article from a decade-old emacs user 
> changing to gvim:
> 
> > http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca/opinions/editors.html
> 
> And continued with this mockery of lisp, and by extension, guile:
> 
> > One part of the article mirrors what I felt about emacs all along:
> > I want to use my text editor for programming, I don't want to have
> > to program my text editor. I don't want to delve into the arcana of elisp.
> > Lisp is a dead language, like Pascal and Ada.

Hmm, i consider myself a fulltime programmer, and the _one_ thing i don't
want to miss is a small set of good tools (i used to be a musician and
in that busssiness the right tool does make quite a difference). 
I' usually don't spend my time writing elisp code (i think the last time
i did it is years ago) but i appreciate the fact that _someone_ was 
able to customize my tool for exactly the tasks i need them for [1].

Pascal is dead? Hmm, want to tell this to Borland and the hords of
Delphi/Kylix programmers out there?

Sometimes five lines of clever elisp code in your .emacs file can
save you hours of work - _my_ customers appreciate this ...

Iff you don't need to customize your application - fine. But why then would
you add scripting support to it in the first place?

> It made me wonder if I should start down this road at all if the general 
> consensus was that Lisp is a dead language.  

Oh, is it? I guess that's why all my recent projects smell rotten :-)

> My colleague ended with a 
> scathing assault on blindly following someone down the path RMS has 
> charted when [he says] fewer and fewer are following that voice:
> 
> > With the advent and rise of Linux, GNOME, Sourceforge, Ximian,
> > Freshmeat, and others, Stallman's abrasive and over-earnest style is
> > making GNU a footnote. 

And still, 90% of the tools i (as a programmer) use daily are neither
Ximian nor Sourceforge or Freshmeat: they are part of the excellent
GNU toolchain - yes, _my_ lexer is flex, _my_ yacc is bison and even
the 'date' command  i use in a lot of my administrative files is 
GNU date. Did your friend actually ever had the p**n, err, "pleasure"
to work with the non-GNU versions? 

And what does Stallman's " abrasive and over-earnest style" have to
do with what tools you use? Do you choose your car by the eye color of
the sales person. Hmm, maybe you do (as a side note: my personal encounters
with Richard Stallman where mostly rather entertaining, homourous and non-
abrasive).


> > As the author points out, fifteen years ago,
> > Stallman could shout "Everyone will now use Guile" and it would
> > happen. Today, the response is, "Yeah, right" and a big yawn. While
> > Stallman and his cronies are off inventing new languages and systems
> > no one will use, the core of the Open Source world is continuing to
> > slip from his grasp. The major packages from GNU aren't even
> > maintained by Stallman's acolytes any more: gcc is a behemoth that
> > lives on its own, glibc is now maintained principally by two Red Hat
> > employees, binutils and GNU make haven't significantly changed in
> > years. If Stallman wants to trace the origin of this trend, he
> > doesn't even need to look as far as Linus Torvalds, he can look in
> > his own back yard. The egcs split from gcc about ten years ago
> > (yikes!!!) should have been the warning shot over the bow for
> > him. The GNU group wanted to follow Stallman wherever he went, the
> > egcs group just wanted to produce a superior compiler. Shortly after
> > the split, it became apparent that users wanted quality and weren't
> > impressed with Stallman's vision. If the GNU team hadn't swallowed
> > their pride, no one would even know what gcc is today.

Oh, it's so easy to tell what would have been. 

> Does he have a point here, and if so, what other options are available 
> for scripting languages to be embedded into applications?  Are there 
> python or perl [or any other] embedding hooks for external scripting of 
> your application that are just as reasonable to use as Guile?

Yes, he has. He doen't want to script an application so he probably
should do it in Perl/Python/TCL/Dylan/JavaScript - you name it. Is this tolling:
it's not _that_ hard to find out about the embedability of today's
scripting languages. Iff you or your friend ahad read the TCL vs. Scheme
texts floating arround you might have seen that there are in fact good
reasons to have Scheme as an embedded language. I guess somehow one 
assumes that by the time you start working on embedding a language you
allready went throught the process of deciding _which_ language to use.

 Just my 0.02$

   Ralf Mattes
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Guile-user mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guile-user