Re: I resign as Guile maintainer

[Greg Harvey <Greg dot Harvey at thezone dot net>]

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

> Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes:
> 
> > I can't be Guile's maintainer any more.  I don't have enough time to
> > meet the responsibilities.
> 
> This is mixed news for the Guile project.  In one way it is bad.  You
> have been a very good maintainer.  In fact, there are no persons in my
> mind right now that could have done a better job.  In another way, it
> is good news because it is a clear signal that something is wrong with
> the Guile project and that something needs to happen.
> 
> I think it is the right decision on your part.  You definitely do not
> need to feel bad about it, if this might be the case.
> 
> Now, what's going to happen with Guile?  Is it dead?  Or merely ill?
> Is its illness infectious?

I think I just heard gcc sneeze :)

> I don't know.  I'm kind of emotionally attached to Guile, because it
> is the project that was my ticket into the Free Software community.  I
> still have the letter from the FSF pinned to my wall that I got when
> signing over my copyrights.  So, it's hard for me to just let Guile
> die.
> 
> I never really resonated with other Scheme implementations either.  I
> slowly began to think that SCM was a good choice as the basis for rms'
> goals of a universal extension language, although I didn't understand
> it in the beginning.  Its design decisions fit well with being a
> library in a C world, and yet it is efficient and makes no
> functionality compromises.  So, I don't think Guile is fundamentally
> technically flawed.
> 
> In my opinion what's wrong with Guile is that it develops more and
> more into a patchwork of half working concepts.  Take my dynamic
> linking support for C modules.  It's horrible.  But yet, I never got
> the urge to do it right.  A large part is lazyness of course, but the
> rest was that I didn't want to replace a bad but basically working
> thing that people are using with something different that isn't
> necessarily better and would only be temporary anyway, until the new
> module system arrived.  But in my view, until attempting the module
> system, we first needed something like GOOPS, for specifying and
> implementing it.  Luckily, Mikael has done GOOPS, but it is a kind of
> unfinished `proof-of-concept' itself (sorry Mikael).  And with Mikael
> leaving, it might end up being in this state for a long time, too.
> Well, on top of that, I now think that before getting GOOPS right, we
> need a compiler framework that can do expensive optimizations.

        I think that a part of the problem has been that more and more
often Jim didn't have enough time (he was excellent when he was
around; over the past year he often hasn't been around, and he may
have held on a little too long, though I can understand why... a
present Jim Blandy was all any project could hope for in a
maintainer), a lot of the work that was non-trivial, or done by people
outside of the development team was neglected, thrown away, or the
person working on it just lost interest and left some half-finished
code. It is very frustrating when you spend quite a bit of time
working on something, send off a patch, and hear nothing; even "it
sucks, go away, you code like my dog craps" is better than nothing
;). After a while of this, you don't really feel so enthusiastic
anymore. Then, if there's anything salvagable, it is usually only
half-finished, and the person in the best position to finish it has
moved on to other things (or is only half-interested when someone
actually takes a look at the code and has suggestions or questions).

> Maybe I'm wanting too much.  Elisp isn't half as sophisticated as
> Guile is already, and it still copes very well.  Then there are
> numerous other Scheme implementations, and maybe when I look hard
> enough, I might find a subtitute for Guile.  Kawa looks very nice,
> given that GCC can natively compile Java now, and jumping on the Java
> wagon might not be wrong either.

Yeah it would ;) 


-- 
Greg