Re: [sawfish] Re: Sawfish in python??? scheme?

[Teika Kazura <teika lavabit com>]

Thanks, Eli and Mario for kind and really helpful reply.

Let me first give a summary of the situation.

  Librep: a wontfix, so better to replace with a good, maintained language.
  rep-gtk: gtk is gtk2, so won't be maintained forever. It also lacks
pango, cairo, etc.
  Chris: Learning scheme. Still has got some loose ends in librep (lisp)
understanding. In contact with Mr. X who kindly offers to work in
librep -> scheme transition. The main engine of Sawfish dev.
  Me (Teika): Don't know Scheme at all, neither python, (most of) gtk.
Speaks Elisp a bit. An active dev of Sawifsh, but not so energetic as
Chris.

On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 01:49:05 -0500, Eli Barzilay wrote:
> But one note [in Racket] is that the GTK level is aimed at gui
> applications

Sawfish needs low-level X (xlib), but gtk is only used for popup menus
and the configurator. If Racket provides its own modern, good set of
API for the gui like Java, then it may be better somehow; coders don't
have to mind the precise platform, gtk or whichever. And that kind of
APIs tend to be easier than the bare ones.

Sawfish seems to use gdk to draw images. It may suffice to write
those codes in C.

On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 07:22:44 -0500, Mario Domenech Goulart wrote:
> I'd like to mention Chicken (http://call-cc.org).

Unfortunately, chicken doesn't have a gtk binding. GUI's available in
chicken are fltk, iup, tk, and qt. At the very least, Sawfish can do
without GUI, but it's not what most users want, including me.

I'm inclined to see the racket as the primary candidate.

> The Chicken community is known to be very friendly and responsive

I've overheard it elsewhere, too. :)

> I wrote most of [Racket's FFI]
> [...]
> any lisp (including librep) would be better than python, IMO.

(Scheme situation rant) One thing I liked about Python is there's only
(almost) one python, which also means libraries are (quite) common,
etc. [1] On the other hand, there're too many Scheme implementations, and
I think it weakens Scheme.  It was hard for me to see which are
good. (It's always so, but it's best to ask. Web pages are too biased
or the opposite. It's rare in Wikipedia to say "this is old.") It's
good that things are converging to racket and chicken.

[1] It really counts. You can't learn all languages in depth.

Racket (= plt-Scheme 5) hasn't arrived to Gentoo linux official tree
yet, but it's not a problem. You can easily install it if you like.

I also looked other Scheme's available in Gentoo, but none seem to
have a maintained gtk binding. (bigloo, gauche, etc.)

Chris, what does Mr. X say? (IIRC Messrs Xs.)

Best regards,
Teika (Teika kazura)

# Chicken -> sawmelet, racket -> sawminton
# In fact, it remains "Sawfish".