Pierre Neidhardt

The popular but aging shells (Bash and the like) suffer from many design flaws: lack of structured data, pipes are hard-to-debug blackboxes, lack of interactivity, while the user interfaces are mostly poor and limiting. High time we moved on away from this cruft, starting with a top-notch interactive language boasting full-fledged introspection and debugging.

For this experiment I've used Common Lisp and SLY, a Common Lisp REPL and development environment for Emacs.

GNU Guix is a universal functional package manager and operating system which respects the freedom of computer users. It focuses on bootstrappability and reproducibility to give the users strong guarantees on the integrity of the full software stack they are running. It supports atomic upgrades and roll-backs which make for an effectively unbreakable system.

I'll present how I intend to leverage the Guile programming language to boost searchability of packages and services via intuitive user interfaces and semantics.

Guix, like many other package managers, suffers from usability issues when it comes to the explorability of the content (that is, packages and services), facing the exorbitant amount of software there is out there. Users should be able to discover the programs they need for a specific task, without having to know them in advance. It should be easy to specify build options for the packages, e.g. "build without sound" or "add IPFS support." They should not have to waste time writing their own hacks and scripts when ready-to-use services already exist and are just waiting to be discovered.

So how do we fix the issue of improving this discoverability, with ease of use?

In the context of the Next Generation Internet initiative, I've started working on enhancing search, discovery and reusability of packages and services.

"A universal software navigator on steroids -- for everyone."