Re: Why use guile?

[Mark Galassi <rosalia cygnus com>]

Guys, this question has already come up.  I include the answer I gave,
and most people seem to think the same way.

Could the FAQ dude (was that you, Todd?) maybe put it in the FAQ?
That way this won't have to come up on the list ever 2 weeks.

[[[my previous answer to this issue on this list]]]

Dear Roberto,

I will certainly not flame you for that; I will only state what I
think most gnomers and GNU types (except for RMS) feel:

There are 4 scripting/extension languages which are widely used and
have good free implementations: scheme, python, perl and tcl.

Any good linux distribution has 3 of those (not scheme yet), and soon
will have all 4 (I expect that Guile will be ready for budling in
linux soon).  And any goos system administrator will install those on
solaris and sunos and hp/ux ... systems.

So if you can get gtk and libgnome bindings for your favourite of
those four languages, you can write very useful programs to use in the
GNOME environment.

But Guile has a special place among those languages, probably in large
part because Marius wrote Guile bindings for Gtk and gnome very early
on in the project.  There is also an objective reason: according to
David Beazley (author of SWIG) guile and tcl have the nicest C library
interfaces for embedding.  This is not to put perl down: it is
certainly a very effective scripting language, but it does not embed
well.