Gregory's Server
The software industry, especially in the realm of free software, has mostly settled on a pattern of using C++ for creating performance critical libraries, and creating Python binding to the C++ libraries for scripting. I was hoping Rust might come along and change all this, but it will take decades.
In the mean time, if you want to use C++ but not actually write C++, you can make use of the ECL Common Lisp compiler, which can compile Lisp to C++ code. This gives you all the best features of Common Lisp for programming with the universe of C++ code libraries available to you. You can use a C++ library and still have Common Lisp macros, garbage collection, high-level scripting, S-expressions as serialization, domain specific languages, a proper meta-object protocol that wraps C++ classes nicely, and wealth of choices for functional programming systems from the untyped lambda calculus all the way up the lambda cube to System-F and the Calculus of Constructs. This not only makes ECL a viable alternative to Python for scripting and app development, but objectively better than Python since you can actually turn your Common Lisp scripts into code that gets compiled into a larger C++ application.
With ECL I would have all sorts of C++ libraries available to me:
- game engines like Unreal and Godot
- 3D modeling: FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, Blender
- Machine learning, big data, and HPC with PyTorch, TensorFlow, OpenCV, OpenCL
- Cross-platform GUIs with Qt, KDE on Linux, native MS Windows programming with Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and MSVC.
I will continue to contribute to the Scheme and Haskell communities as much as I can. I will continue to pursue my dream of an Xfce-like desktop environment written in Scheme. I will continue to use Guile and Guix for package management and software development. But no matter how I look at it, I am going to be more productive in the long run using ECL and C++.
I was hoping that the software industry would gradually shift over to better, more functional languages like Rust and Haskell. And I would love it if Scheme languages could ever begin to seriously replace Python as a scripting language. But realistically, I think I am going to change tack and meet the industry half way. I think I should probably start using ECL as my language of choice, as much as I would prefer Scheme or an ML-family language like Haskell.