Goblins: Distributed, Transactional Programming with Racket and Guile

The dev world just conjured Goblins, a toolkit that lets tiny “digital goblins” (little pieces of code) live anywhere on the internet and talk to each other safely. It promises easy message‑passing between different languages (Racket and Guile), built‑in safety “locks and keys,” and handy “undo if it breaks” steps for local actions—plus powerful debugging and save‑and‑upgrade tricks. Sounds magical, right? The crowd’s early verdict: intrigued, impressed, and loudly curious.

One camp is swooning—“Spritely develops very interesting, high-level software,” cheered one fan, while another shouted out their browser‑friendly tool Hoot and called the team’s work “crazy interesting.” But the thread’s spice comes from the skeptics. One voice grumbled it “feels like there’s a protocol missing,” basically asking, where’s the common language glue for the whole system? Another turned the chat into a vibe check: is Goblins just actor‑style messaging with a new hat—“like Erlang,” the granddaddy of message‑passing systems—or “apples with bicycles?” That quip became the meme of the day. A final commenter asked how this stacks against Tony Garnock‑Jones’s actor model—translation: which tiny‑worker system wears the crown for safety and simplicity. The mood: neat work, now show the receipts—what’s the why, and how is this truly different