Sixteen years later: still need a GNU extension language

Costs of the GNU hackers Meeting 2011, Andy Wingo wrote a long piece on the status of Guile Scheme, the sadly under-used official languages ​​of user extension of GNU. Wingo said that Guile is the best choice for the extension of GNU given the system’s ability to adapt to changes over time. Presented to the use of Javascript example, instead of the scheme’s popularity: We should also consider the costs of language use hastily conceived. JavaScript has some crazy stuff wrong, as with var lifting, poor numerical model, the dynamic range, the lack of modularity binding on research … Finally, we question life. If GNU had chosen Tcl because it was popular, we would have a mass of dead code (note that Guile does partially support JavaScript syntax). With the proliferation of Firefox extensions, Greasemonkey, etc., it is clear that there are many power users who want to change the software they use, without spending years to become skilled programmers. Maybe after Emacs has been ported to the philosophy of Guile user scalability will be extended to other parts of the GNU system.