It’s been a minute, but I’m back after having spent a bit of time trying to get started with Goblins to prototype some ideas I’ve discussed here.
Maybe it’s because I’m not (yet) intimately familiar with Goblins and how OCapN etc. work under the hood, so take this with a grain of salt, please: getting started with Guile and Goblins is not easy.
I say this as a person who has been developing professionally for 20+ years, knows the Lisp basics, runs Arch Linux as my daily driver, has an embarrassingly heavily customized Neovim/terminal setup, and has used Nix in the past to manage system level packages.
Going through the Goblins manual, I went through the initial steps to install Guile and guile-goblins. Guile is available on Arch, which was great! Goblins was not, so I considered my options (install via Guix or build from source) and went with Guix. I installed Guix while carefully reading its Arch wiki page to avoid borking my system with a new competing package manager.
Once Guix was installed and configured some 30-45 minutes later, it was time to install Goblins. So I ran guix pull and guix install guile-goblins and proceeded to wait for Guix to apparently download and install its entire universe. I don’t know how long it took, because I ended up walking away from my laptop to work on something else and coming back much later. I may have even had to run it more than once before it all succeeded. All the while, I’m wondering if I should have used guix shell and wrote a manifest to ensure I was setting up a well isolated dev environment. Or set up a Guix profile to keep things clean and organized. I don’t know. Guix is still new to me.
Then, because I didn’t particularly feel like learning Emacs after all that, I spent another couple hours trying and failing to set up Conjure in Neovim—which I’d previously set up to work with Python and Clojure without much pain—to properly communicate with a Guile REPL socket.
Anyway. That’s a decent bit of grumbling, for which I apologize. But the point is hopefully clear: if a person such as myself tried and mostly gave up before even getting through the Goblins tutorial, how does Spritely expect for these tools to gain decent adoption without an implementation in a language ecosystem that more developers are willing and able to use, and that enables some sense of productivity in, say, a couple hours that are not mostly spent just trying to install and run the core dependencies?
Are there limitations to the underlying concepts that make Lisp a necessary choice? If so, are there other, more common (heh) Lisp variants that have a lower barrier to entry? Or can the concepts be eventually implemented in a language like Python, JavaScript, Go or Rust but I’m just here a few years too early to see that on the horizon?
Forgive the rant; hopefully y’all still see the underlying concern and can talk me down with logic and some missing context. 