Re: my latest blog post

[Catonano <catonano@gmail.com>]

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2018-06-08 6:24 GMT+02:00 Christopher Lemmer Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>
:

> I think Catonano and Mark discussed things nicely earlier in the thread,
> so I'm not going to weigh in on that (though I do agree that we would
> can and should do better, but that also it's important to realize that
> community members only have so many personal resources to be able to
> respond sometimes).
>

Note taken. My bad


> Guile still matters a lot to me.  I think Guile has a long way to go,
> but I look at it more that there is an opportunity for us to do better
> than that we have failed currently.  What can we do to move in the right
> direction?
>

I think an important step is acknowledging the importance of the quality of
the experience with GNU tools, as Fis also remarked.

To me "the computer for the rest of us" is still a landmark

I know that Apple is not commonly associated with software freedom concerns

But the Apple computing experience has been empowering to countless people,
me included.

The experience does matter.

So, is a macro stepping facility missing ? Clearly state so in the manual

Andy Wingo has a post in which he lists tasks he'd lie to be implemented on
Guile, many of them have to do with the file format of the compiled files.

Some love should go to the quality of the experience too, not only to the
tech issues

Andy and Ludo are way too competent, they unawarely set the bar very high

This is a cognitive issue, I understand that, I'm not blaming anyone

Ludo openly said so in several occasions, he even included an indication
about where a funtion was being declared and where it was being called in a
scrap of Nix code, in one of his talks

And I think he did so because *I* had said that in Nix I could't
distinguish when a function was being declared and when it was being called

So he's aware of the problem

As for me I don't know exactly what cold be done

I tried to elicit some debate

I suggested some edits to the Guile manual

These are tiny steps, more could be envisioned; I just can't come up with
anything more right now

Allow me only one last remark

Fis claimed that the error messages that Guile provides them with don't
include indications about in which file the error occurred

So he's using Chez scheme instead of Guile, if I remember correctly

I take from this that the Chez scheme error mesages are better.

Mark wrote to Fis in that thread on the Guile mailing list that in order to
have better error messages, the compiler should be modified (and that would
be an awful lot of work)

This is similar to the contrast on macro stepping

Racket has a luxury macro stepping experience, Guile has no macro stepper

So how does Chez scheme manage to provide better error messages ?

I'm not trying to be adversarial again, here, Mark

I just think that the problem deserves to be mapped out so that people know
what they're getting into

I praise software freedom myself

But I think the empowerment component is being overlooked

My suspect is that over the years, Andy Wingo made some design choices in
implementing Guix that implicitly sacrificed the experience to the benefit
of performance, or oter technical aspects

Possibly because he was alone in this task and the amount of work he could
devolve into Guile was finite.

So now it's important to map things out so that we know where we are and
where we want to aim.

I know my contributions are extremely modest so I' not the most entitled
person to discuss the design of GNU tools

Please bear with me

Making my concerns known is all I can do right now

But I will look into the Guile manual in the coming days and I will try to
draft a decent tractation of macro stepping in Guile scheme

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