I work on Guile because I enjoy messing with compilers. I absolutely agree that very few projects use it (exceptions include Lilypond and GNUCash). However, that might change - Guile 2.0 switched from a simple interpreter to a virtual machine and a compiler to that VM. That means that Guile is competitive in speed with other scripting languages (and actually faster than some of them, I believe). It also means that it now supports multiple high-level languages. There is currently a good Emacs Lisp implementation and about half of an ECMAScript implementation.
I don't know if it'll become more widely used, but on the mailing lists you certainly see people writing libraries and contributing code, so I think there is a real chance of it. My sense is that Guile is now coming out of a period of stagnation. I don't know where it's going.
You appear to be right, but I don't know anything about it.
That's exciting, though - it would be really cool if Makefiles could do more computation. Maybe then we'd get an easier-to-use autoconfiguration system!
On one hand I'm a bit afraid that this might add more complexity to an already complex tool. But on the other hand the current tools in Make are very ugly to use. So Guile could certainly be an improvement.
I work on Guile because I enjoy messing with compilers. I absolutely agree that very few projects use it (exceptions include Lilypond and GNUCash). However, that might change - Guile 2.0 switched from a simple interpreter to a virtual machine and a compiler to that VM. That means that Guile is competitive in speed with other scripting languages (and actually faster than some of them, I believe). It also means that it now supports multiple high-level languages. There is currently a good Emacs Lisp implementation and about half of an ECMAScript implementation.
I don't know if it'll become more widely used, but on the mailing lists you certainly see people writing libraries and contributing code, so I think there is a real chance of it. My sense is that Guile is now coming out of a period of stagnation. I don't know where it's going.