Seeds of the "movement" [was: peasant revolt]

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu>]

Brent,

To be realistic:

> (1)  Agreement amongst the various Schemes as to a "standard library":

It won't happen.  Some of the points of departure are genuine
differences in philosophy, eg, over the nature of modules/objects.
Others are technical differences that are somewhat less deep but
perhaps even more insoluble.  As an example, Guile has (had?)
primitives that introduced aliasing into the language.  We would
shudder at this; their attitude was, so what?  Of course, they don't
have a MrSpidey-like tool, or study how semantics affects compilation
(something Mike Vanier and you have indirectly alluded to a few times
in the past few days), to understand why that could matter.

I used to be a strong advocate of cross-Scheme portability.  I tired
Matthias out on this topic early in my grad career.  No longer; I see
now what he knew then.  Cross-Scheme portability is an energy vampire.

As I've said before, it's misleading to think about Scheme as a
language.  Think of it as a model, an idea.  It serves that purpose
superbly.  When you translate ideas into languages, you get everything
from SIOD to PLT Scheme.  In some ways, PLT Scheme may be closer in
spirit to something like Python than it is to SIOD.  So if you're
going to unify any two languages, which two make more sense?  (I'm not
suggesting we unify with Python, just illustrating a point.)

I applaud your spirit, and admire your perseverence.  It isn't,
however, something I intend to expend time on.  There are far too many 
more important things to do.  Such as:

> (2)  Easy distribution of modules:

I don't see any problem creating an archive.  Indeed, Matthew Flatt
runs one already, and I doubt he's turning away too many comers.  I
think the bigger problem is the contributions, not the existence of
the archive.  In my very opinionated belief, time spent on Scheme
unification efforts is time better spent on fatting the archive.

Shriram