My 2 cents: - Doing something in Guile is tough. I've been trying since 2011.
Why is it tough? - The manual is written by very smart people for very smart people. Not for newcomers. I'm excited to see what Blake comes up with, but the content will probably still be not-trivial. At the end of the day it's a reference manual, not a book to teach you how to write a new project from scratch. - There are no simple and modern resources that teach what is the "Guile/Scheme" way. How do you even organize a project when you start? Or something like https://go.dev/tour/ to teach the basics. Yes, you can read books but most people when they start to learn a new language they just want to try to do something quick. And the books that teach Scheme are not trivial/practical. - Lack of libraries. We do have libraries but the ecosystem is not big and for those libraries we have it's hard to get started, most don't have simple examples or don't have examples at all. - Assuming you find the library you need... how do you start using it? How do you install it? Now there's Guix, but not everyone has Guix or wants to install Guix. I'm on macOS currently so I can't even install Guix unfortunately. - Lack of support in editors other than Emacs (yes, geiser is great!). There's a project that might help there: https://gitlab.com/rgherdt/scheme-lsp-server. But LSP is not enough, you need a paredit equivalent, etc. - Creating a new library is (or was) not easy. guile-hall and guix help here. But how do newcomers even find "guile-hall"? Should guile-hall be part of Guile and included in the manual? - Distributing the new library you have created is (or was) not easy either. Also, guile-hall and guix issues here. So basically today we are kind of forcing people to learn Emacs and Guix (if you can even use Guix) to have a minimum decent environment. For me starting with Guile was not hard because of autotools, I already had to deal with that for many years. For me the hardest part was the lack of resources (libraries, tutorials, examples, simple books). As for myself, I've been trying to create libraries to replicate what I use at work (and I'm far from that) or others that I find fun. And I will try to keep doing that to improve Guile's ecosystem and help with anything else I can. Best, Aleix