Re: Updated Guile Tutorial

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

On Thu 06 Aug 2009 20:34, Daniel Kraft <d@domob.eu> writes:

> the last days, I worked on a rewrite of the Guile Tutorial (with the
> Tortoise package); just for fun, but also to update some stuff to my
> liking and last but not least change the API usage from the deprecated
> GH routines to the current scm_ ones.

This is great work. Thanks for bringing our tutorial up to date! I just
looked over the existing tutorial, and wow, anything that mentions Lotus
1-2-3, and fvwm...

A few comments, IMO of course. Neil probably has a better perspective.

 1) It would be better to have a more neutral narrator -- not a
    first-person narrator. If you feel like you need to speak from the
    first person, use "we". OTOH your style is infectious :), so perhaps
    it would work as "Guile Tutorial, by Daniel Kraft" :)

 2) Don't mention the history of the tutorial. Just have it be a current
    document.

 3) In general, use short sentences. Let your words breathe.

 4) If you're forking to run gnuplot, why not do so from Scheme? Of
    course if you did that it would obviate the whole "extending C"
    story, but still, if given this particular problem, that's what I'd
    do.

 5) Running a main loop (as gtk+ does) and a REPL is indeed an
    interesting problem. See event-repl.scm or graphical-repl.scm in
    guile-gnome for a couple of takes.

 6) I wish we had a better Scheme->C story; our C->Scheme story is fine,
    but a better FFI would be nice.

Anyway, IMO, FWIW, etc. If you don't reply, I'll probably just commit
your tutorial more-or-less as-is to the repo :)

A
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