Discussion
I switched from Python to Guile as my go-to scripting language a few months ago and I've been enjoying it.
Pros:
- Guile is a Scheme
- Guile is slop-free
- Guile is faster than Python
- Guile can easily be embedded in other programs
- Guile easily compiles to WASM with Hoot
Cons:
- Guile's syntax can be less readable
- Guile's ecosystem is smaller
- Guile is less documented
@cwebber Oh! I didn't know about rainbow-delimeters. I'll look into all of these thank you those will be helpful!
You may also want to look into paredit if you haven't already. This animated guide is quite helpful in explaining what it is:
http://danmidwood.com/content/2014/11/21/animated-paredit.html
Lisps and structural editing are made for each other.
@liberty I also find smartparens to be wonderful. While @dthompson and many others swear by paredit, the True Way of editing lisp as an AST, I personally find it nice that smartparens allows for both you to edit as AST and to cheat and treat it as just text. Paredit requires that you fully buy in, but since I'm working in a text editor, sometimes I treat it as just text.
(It'll be different when I'm dogfooding Professor Hoot ;))
@liberty I'm making that switch as well. I used a Scheme (forget which one) pretty extensively a long time back, but more recently have been in Python for everything.
My personal biggest Pro is that Guile is *fun*. With Emacs and the set of plugins Spritely recommends Scheme feels like flying, very little between my thoughts and code, in a way that if Python ever did it has long since ceased to.
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@liberty If you're using emacs, I find that with rainbow-delimeters and highlight-parentheses, after a while, lispy syntax becomes the easiest thing to read of them all. But it takes some acclimating to!
rainbow-identifiers also helps I feel, but not everyone is going to be into that :)