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


From: Tom Lord
Subject: Re: What can I do to help? (conclusions)
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 12:48:32 -0700 (PDT)


Yay!  Sanity:

       address@hidden

       > I think that it's far more productive to have particular
       > application-level needs in mind, always keeping an eye on
       > generality where possible, than to work on a checklist per se
       > (or a comparison with what is available for other languages).


How about:


*) some Sim* style games

*) a "robot-wars" game

*) a symbolic math package with nice display features

*) a customizable graphing package designed with your favorite
   nearby underbudgeted scientists

*) a customizable auto-classifier for incoming email

*) an implementation of the `arch' revision control system :-)

*) a customizable `lint' for C programs

*) a customizable file manager with both text-based and graphical
   interfaces

*) a _fast_ cellular automata toy, with gosper's 13-way recursion hack
   for peering _far_ into the future

*) (with apologies to GnuCash) a purely-scheme finance manager

*) a fancy wiki

*) a database and syntax-based query engine for programs ("precise tags")

*) an interactive shell

*) a suite of the standard, core PDA apps, with both text and
   graphical interfaces

*) an extensible text formatting system to replace texinfo


I think all the apps in that list would benefit from (or even require)
extensibility.  They'd all benefit from the conciseness that can be
achieved by doing them in Scheme.   Several of them require some GUI
tools.  Several will put pressure on text processing and/or shell
features.  All of them will present some performance challenges.

An alternative would be to pick a handful of such apps and then start
architecting a framework first -- but my sense is that that would
require a dedicated team of people hacking Guile full-time for it to
take less than an eternity.   So, yeah, using some specific apps to
drive a hill-climbing approach to framework evolution might yield
interesting results.

-t





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