Re: Introducing Guix "Features"! (Was: Syntactic Diabetes)

[Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name>]

> there for most of the time already. And if you think about it,
> symlinking stuff to /etc is a service.

i've arrived to guix after 3+ decades of programming, most of that in opensource environments, unix-like OS'es, and more than a decade using linux as my primary OS and lisp as my goto language.

it could be me, of course, but it took me months of tinkering until i understood the guix service vs shepherd service nomenclature. and i still need to focus when i'm dealing with foo-service-type and shepherd services at the same time.

this nomenclature was an obstacle to understanding, because the naming suggests something that was misleading me.

for an average unix user a service is a process that is running in the backgroud, doing stuff mostly without any user interaction. you can try to argue this away, but i'm afraid that this is the state of things.

and if you care whether your words (code) is communicating what you want to be understood by your audience, then you must consider their model of reality.

which reminds me of:

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
	— Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition

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• attila lendvai
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“As a rule, whatever we don’t deal with in our lives, we pass on to our children. Our unfinished emotional business becomes theirs. As a therapist said to me, "Children swim in their parents’ unconscious like fish swim in the sea."”
	— Gábor Máté (1944–), 'In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts' (2008)