Re: Some macros to make package definitions prettier

[taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)]

Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> writes:

> Actually, I do not like the imperative, non-functional style of these
> syntax rules. For me, they rather obscure what is happening.

For those not very familiar with Scheme, the sequential notation will be
significantly more readable.  For those familiar with Scheme, it should
be trivial to learn.  Wouldn't you say it's worth it in the long run?

And just to chip in my personal opinion, I find the deeply nested and
reverse notation to be fairly ugly. :-) The notation I propose builds on
the idea of a pipeline, which is still purely functional, and I suspect
it's more intuitive to most humans even if they know FP well.

> The general drawback of such syntax rules is that newcomers do not see
> all the inner cogwheels of the system. So on one hand, one gains that
> contributing packages becomes easier; on the other hand, understanding
> what is actually happening becomes harder, and also learning scheme
> through guix becomes more difficult as we move to our own domain
> specific language.

Indeed, I agree.  However, I think these are simple enough macros, such
that if the manual just shows with an example what their use expands to,
it should be enough for those interested to quickly grasp it.

Taylan