Guile has been the scripting language of choice for GNU before the Internet was called Internet. It hasn't even been disliked, it's been simply ignored, for the most part.
I know that's true, having heard it talked about a lot over the years. But why, though? What is it about Guile that made GNU pick it over CL or Scheme (or TCL or Lua or...)?
NM, answered my own question. It’s literally Scheme.
> The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!
> Another lesson from Emacs is that the way to make sure an extension facility is really flexible is to use it to write a large portion of the ordinary released system. If you try to do that with Tcl, you will encounter its limitations.
> Tcl was not designed to be a serious programming language. It was designed to be a "scripting language", on the assumption that a "scripting language" need not try to be a real programming language. So Tcl doesn't have the capabilities of one. It lacks arrays; it lacks structures from which you can make linked lists. It fakes having numbers, which works, but has to be slow.
From Why you should not use Tcl by Richard Stallman [1].
Brilliant. That's exactly the kind of information I was missing. I don't know enough about Tcl to opine on whether he was right, but if that's what RMS thought about it, I can see why he'd push back hard against it..
Guile is an implementation of Scheme. As for why not CL, Stallman has expressed his dislike for CL, especially as a scripting language a lot of times over the years. Which is pretty funny because a lot of the criticisms he has about it (like the namespace system and keyword arguments) are in Guile now.
