Re: Around again, and docs lead role

From: rm@fabula.de
Cc: guile-user@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Around again, and docs lead role
Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 21:47:42 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20030504194742.GB16222@www> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <m3u1cb8yeo.fsf@latakia.dyndns.org>

On Sat, May 03, 2003 at 04:21:03PM -0600, Robert Uhl wrote:
> rm@fabula.de writes:
> > I had similar experiences.  The existing documentation *is* very good,
> > but i was astonished to find a few undocumented jewels (well, actually
> > pretty neccessary stuff:) in the header files...
> 
> Yup--exactly the problem I've had.  There are a few things (which I
> cannot recall anymore) 

In german we call it "Verdraengung" (repression) :-)

> which have been right royal bears without docs.
> Most of 'em I've solved by digging through headers, figuring them out
> once, and then copy-pasting from then on.  Not the most elegant way to
> handle things, for certain:-}

Well, it's a nice way to get comfortable living in the guts of guile,
but scares application programmers who 'just' need guile as an embedded
language.

> > > But other than that it's been decent.  Of course, I did have to
> > > learn Scheme from SICP; it'd be nice were there an intro to Scheme
> > > itself somewhere.
> > 
> > Hmm, there a a handfull of pretty good Scheme intros available, why
> > bother duplicating these efforts (better: write a Guile-specific
> > addendum for one of these).
> 
> Well, most of them seem to either be print books (which cost dough), or
> written specifically for some incompatible dialect.  

??? "Teach yourself Scheme in fixnum day" is free and takes greate care
*not* to be dialect specific. SICP is available online as well ...

> The bigger issue is
> that I imagine most of us want Guile to become the extension package of
> choice, even more popular than Perl or Python.  To be successful at
> that, it's useful to have a tutorial, particularly when the language is
> as odd as a Lisp dialect can seem as first.  Those unfamiliar with
> Scheme who happen upon Guile are likely to skip past, scared away by the
> parentheses and lack of a thorough introduction.

I don't know. Somehow i have the feeling that a Scheme based scripting
language will never be as popular as Perl or Python etc. (and i'm not
even shure i want that). My first encounter with Scheme was ScruptFu
(the Gimp's scripting language). There were a handfull of rather simple
intros and close to no real documentation -- still i somehow managed to
get my filter written (the anoying part where the missing features of
the dialect -- anyone for a Guile/Gimp???).

Ralf Mattes

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