Re: guile user base

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

I don’t have any data to answer your question.  It also seems to me that
the Racket and Chicken communities are very active, and have good tools
for that, such as PLaneT and Eggs.

Yet, Guile has been one of the most widely installed Scheme
implementations, which I think is mostly because it started as “the
official GNU extension language”.  This has two implications: a few
widely used applications depend on it (LilyPond, GnuCash, TeXmacs, cgen,
etc.), and socially, it targets free software hackers in general and not
just Schemers or functional programmers (I’m not arguing on whether it’s
successful at that, just that the approach is different from that of
other Schemes.)

FWIW, Debian’s popularity contest shows these ranks (see
<http://popcon.debian.org/by_inst>):

  868   guile-1.8-libs
  15462 racket-common
  24184 libchicken5

Thanks,
Ludo’.