Re: Comment style docstrings

[Rob Browning]

Michael Livshin <address@hidden> writes:

> the context I used the word "healthy" in is, well, Guile itself.  I
> just don't see the project progressing very well lately -- but this
> is very subjective.  you may (and probably do?) find it wrong.

While I do sympathize a bit, I actually think things have been going
fairly well lately, and that most of the "problems" I've noticed are
just detail oriented ones, rather than big complicated issues (guile
has no shortage of great ideas and extremely clever people.), and
fortunately, the annoying "detail oriented" type problems are usually
fairly easy to solve, given suitable elbow grease.

For example, since I think having stable releases more often and
sub-point releases incorporating bug fixes is *very* important, I'm
going to try and make sure that happens, starting soon.  Brace
yourself for 1.6.0, and if possible, better communication with the OS
distributions -- I'd like to help make sure that the version of guile
they ship is as recent as possible, and that they pacakge guile in
such a way that multiple library versions can coexist.  This helps
make sure people can easily see what we're up to, and that programs
that depend on guile can ask that the user have a recent version
installed without inflicting undue hardship.  Having to maintain
support for 1.3, 1.3.4, and 1.4 becomes tedious after a while.

I also think that having a reasonably full suite of srfis available in
the normal distribution, having a good compiler/byte-compiler/jit
system with profiler, and having a well defined (even if not perfect)
module system are all very important parts of the process of making an
amazing language something people will turn to more often for regular
work.

Fortunately, on nearly all of these fronts, it seems to me that good
progress is being made lately, and I'm going to try and do what I can
to help as time permits.

-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930