Re: What can I do to help? (conclusions)

[Evan Prodromou]

>>>>> "WB" == William Bland <address@hidden> writes:

    WB> If anyone wants to try to talk me out of it though, I'm still
    WB> open to comments ;-)

Dr. Bland,

It's absolutely criminal that you could come and ask for a job to do
and get turned away. There is so, so, so much to do. Shame on us!

I think there are a ton of projects that need to be done for Guile
that are not yet done. For example:

    * A SAX2 parser GOOPS interface and drivers for libxml, expat,
      xerces, etc.  (Whoever told you not to make it easy for Guile
      developers to use XML is a bonehead, by the way. XML will never
      be s-expressions, but that doesn't mean that using it isn't
      important!)

    * A DOM library for GOOPS. I've got one just about done, but not
      quite yet.

    * A module for using zlib, with a special mechanism for
      transparent compression on ports

    * A module for gdbm and/or Berkeley DB, with a mechanism for
      transparent storage
      
    * GUMM (talk to thi about this)

    * Modularization of many of the Guile built-ins (there's just too
      too many! This is, by the way, crappy grunt work, which is why
      the main developers should be shoveling it off on people like
      you and me B-))

    * Guile SOAP bindings (using guile-www as HTTP carrier)

    * URL parser module (string -> (protocol, server, path, fragment))

    * HTML parser module

    * GPG-ME bindings (see http://www.gnupg.org/ for details)

    * SMTP and POP3 modules
    
    * An NNTP module

    * An FTP module

    * Gnutella network module

    * Jabber module (sure would need XML there)

    * An interface meta-class for GOOPS. (Yes, I know interfaces
      aren't CLOS-y. Yes, they're still useful)

    * Drivers for guile-simplesql (http://guile-simplesql.sf.net/),
      esp. for commercial RDBMSes like Oracle.

    * An interface from Guile to a comprehensive image management
      library like ImageMagick

    * A library of simple AI tools, such as logic programming, fuzzy
      logic, planners, etc. 

Just for giggles, try comparing the Guile projects list:

         http://www.glug.org/projects/

...to CPAN:

         http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-category/

...or the Vaults of Parnassus (Python modules):

         http://www.vex.net/parnassus/

...or the Ruby Application Archive:

         http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa.html

There's a ton of stuff up there that have no equivalent in Guile. We
need to make those. 

I think in general it should be a goal to have Guile modules that wrap
_all_ the libraries on ftp.gnu.org. Another is to have modules for all
major Internet protocols. That should keep us all busy for the next
two years. B-)

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou
address@hidden