Re: Ideas for a Guile tutorial to go with the new site

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

BCG writes:

> On 10/19/2015 12:29 PM, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
>> Amirouche Boubekki writes:
>>
>>> To the contrary I think it's not a good idea to start upfront the
>>> tutorial with which editor should be used is a good way to loose half of
>>> the readers, because they will feel more uncomfortable and not up to the
>>> task. To be useful emacs requires one 'Getting Started' tutorial in
>>> itself. Or anykind of setup for that matter. The tutorial should go as
>>> quickly as possible to the matter and start with coding.
>>>
>>> I started a tutorial at http://hypermove.net/. I don't introduce
>>> readline until the user knows what the REPL is. Part 1 is all done in
>>> REPL. I subtly introduce emacs as a good choice for an editor in part 2
>>> which is done in an editor. But doesn't enforce it.
>> Okay, sorry if I wasn't being clear... my goal in that section would be
>> to encourage everyone who *isn't already an emacs user* to pick up a
>> simple editor and know how to use that with Guile, but them give them a
>> brief tip that they want to look into Emacs + Geiser once they've dived
>> in a bit more deeply.
>>
>> I don't think this section needs to be too long.  I agree it should not
>> be overwhelming.
>>
> Personally I would appreciate a not-so-brief tip.  Most resources on the 
> web about coding in scheme seem to claim that emacs is the best 
> environment for it, but rarely go into the reasoning about why or 
> provide a focused way to get started with it.  I'd be happy to try out 
> those tools, but it hardly is worth it to me to slog through the emacs 
> tutorial just to see if I like whatever advantages it may have for 
> coding Scheme.
>
> After so many years of vi muscle memory I just can't find justification 
> to slow down my productivity and learn emacs... but I wouldn't mind 
> doing it just for Guile coding where I'm not really productive yet 
> anyways - especially if there was getting started guide focused on that 
> with pointers to other resources for a deeper dive if I like it.
>
> Even if I didn't end up switching to emacs for everything, I may find 
> that I want to use it just for Scheme... just like I fire up Eclipse 
> when I want to work on Java, but I don't bother using Eclipse for 
> anything else
>
> It doesn't seem like a suggestion for a development environment should 
> distract too much from a tutorial, but maybe that is too much to expect 
> when your audience includes hackers. ;)
>
> Just my opinion, which is worth what you paid for it.
>
> -- Ben

Thanks for the input!  Maybe we can go both ways... keep it brief in the
tutorial, but have a link to "for more on why this is, see this link"
which goes to the manual, or some blogpost, or other resource?