Oy please. Some Lispers are stuck in the past with their ivory tower ideals, saddened that nobody wants their favorite flavor of Lisp anymore. Why can't you embrace the fact that Lisp just like any other idea does have right to evolve and change?
> Did Gauche stop existing?
Out of all the five people who ever heard about it, three probably stopped using it and for the rest, it may just be like it never existed - they've never heard about it.
Clojure on the other hand somehow managed to become third most popular JVM language and very popular alt-js language. Out of all PLs that can be considered somewhat esoteric, Clojure today is the most vibrant - it has more books, podcasts and conferences. More than Elixir, OCaml, Haskell, Elm, Purescript and even Rust.
Very few people used Guile, even before Clojure got some spotlight. So instead of whining why can't you be happy for the fact that people still want to use Lisp in 2020 at all?
Because I'm a clojure programmer, not a scheme programmer. While I think scheme is nice, I know clojure well and really like much of its design. So, for me, if someone had said "hey, try this guile thing instead of bash" I'd pass it over like the many other projects I pass over all the time, but this interested me because it lets me use a language I know and like.
Why use two languages with similar semantics when you can use one with nearly identical semantics? It might make sense for Emacs Lisp because there are things you’d do differently in a modern Lisp (Guile Emacs sounds great to me), but Clojure is already modern. Interface costs, both human and technical, aren’t free.
Man, I'm pretty up to date on things but I admit this is the first time I've heard of Gauche. Seems like a pretty mature project too what with the 907 page PDF manual.
Because one day you go to look for minimal cli programs and find githubs littered with "minimal dependencies, only nodeJS!".
It's madness. There's already several much better tools people should be using for these domains, but they seem to insist on importing their massive and bloated toolchain in instead.
The materials that go into that binary which don't come from the project itself are external dependencies.
There is a dependency on a Java VM implementation, GraalVM, and on a Small Clojure interpreter. That looks Node-ish to me, regardless of the application deployment model.
GraalVM has some kind of updater, "gu", that's looks reminiscent of npm:
> The materials that go into that binary which don't come from the project itself are external dependencies.
Not sure what you're on about... any piece of software is going to be composed of smaller pieces. What's wrong with that?
> There is a dependency on a Java VM implementation
Only for developing it.
> GraalVM
GraalVM is many things. This is compiled using GraalVM Native Image which compiles JVM bytecode into a native binary executable. There is no JVM hidden away in that executable either.
> and on a Small Clojure interpreter
The fact that it uses a a library (by the same author) for interpreting Clojure - what exactly is the issue here? If he didn't separate that into a library it would be fine, but the moment it's modular it's an issue to you?
> GraalVM has some kind of updater, "gu", that's looks reminiscent of npm:
GraalVM includes a command-line utility and that means it has the NPM cooties...?
I don't know what planet you come from, but on my [primitive] planet people haven't yet learned how to build working software with exactly zero dependencies.
Tinyscheme doesn't have baked in and complete posix/libc/etc bindings.
Also you'd have to say R5RS -> R7RS is somehow a fall into complexity which makes absolutely no sense.
Scsh hasn't been updated for over a decade.
I appreciate the satire but I think compared to something like Guile, no one has answered what this does better beyond personal preference. And honestly, I don't see that alone as a good justification.
I could have a preference for using Matlab to bootstrap embedded devices but that doesn't make it a good idea.
The amount of code, libraries, and resources needed to make this glorified calculator on a "smartphone" is truly overwhelming.
Could literally do the same thing extremely well with an ncurses program and a damn ssh link back to home.
Could literally have done the same thing with Google docs.
But no it's gotta be an app so Susan can use her smartphone. This is an official event, not an ad hoc conversation during soccer practice. Yet, apparently no one could setup a small desktop or a laptop to handle a singularly simple task and do it well.
Instead, social onus and seemingly common wisdom says everything must be a fancy looking app, and proceeds to throw 60k down the drain to accomplish nothing.
Quantification seems to be the degradation of perception towards the proper understanding of human ability. It seems realistic to say that humans prefer simple matrices with which to view reality.
Consider when someone common argues politics, but their first inclination is to fall back to statistics. They have now canceled out the component sum of all other elements in the set of understanding, only to rely on numbers as the indicator of truth.
Boethius once wrote about the 10 properties of man, one being number, and the others being place, position, attributes...etc. Yet, most of these are rarely used when you really get down to it.
Ezra Pound once made a statement that poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost.
And there really lies the connection I mean to give. Poetry is that which embraces Boethius' 10 properties including the numeric. Math in the most pure sense is focused only on quantity until it is applied to a context. (Physics, etc).
Language in itself is, discounting the vocal portions, a tool of symbolic manipulation. And from this one can generate a theory of linguistics, much like the Greeks, as that which binds symbols to images within a context, and the intended excitation of the senses.
Even math is explained and used as bound symbols within a context followed by a sort of kinesthetic sense.
Atop both of these, respectively, is grammar and the rules of mathematics.
Anyway, this is getting too long for a comment but this is my point.
- I think language and math are under a unified form of intelligence because the utilities used to perform them reach towards the same foundation.
- Poetry and writing is underappreciated not because it is technically inept, but for the reason that society has currently degraded it's understanding towards a single attribute (the numeric) and interprets anything that isn't a number as something which must originate from emotion.
- Emotion is hard to quantify so it is viewed as a isolated creative art that is not perceived as a criteria for what people mean when they think about intelligence.
- The author and the poet can and should be using their art with a technical foundation.
- Our current writers actually imply the state of society far greater than we think, which is ironic because they have the power to lead society.
- Intelligence tests as a metric imply an end result which is numeric. This is not a whole picture. Even if the number is representative of an abstract process used to indicate the success of solving a problem.
In other, other words, writing is viewed as a lesser art when it comes to quantifying intelligence because it is incompatible with such a motion in a world where the only viewpoint funnels into the numeric. It is also lesser because the quality of contemporary writing has a stark contrast to those works before us.
This is just embracing complexity when scheme is a perfect fit, and already exists in multiple ways in the domain.
Did Gauche stop existing?
http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/