How GNU Guile is 10x better (2021)
draketo.de
draketo.de
Yes, it has an info manual and, I agree, info is the superior documentation viewer. However, a good browser is no replacement for bad writing.
The Guile manual is not well written. The organization seems almost random. The text emphasizes minutia while glossing over fundamental details. It off-loads much to RnRSs and SFRIs (whatever those are). Basically, it suffers badly from The Curse of Expertise.
The documentation's shortcomings might be okay except that Guile is, or was, the premier extension language for the whole of the GNU project.
I considered trying to improve the manual, but why would I dedicate time and effort to a language that I don't know and whose community can't follow it's own advice?
Consider the following:
"Make sure your manual is clear to a reader who knows nothing about the topic and reads it straight through. This means covering basic topics at the beginning, and advanced topics only later. This also means defining every specialized term when it is first used." https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/GNU-Manuals.htm...
Most of these points: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/gnu-press/GNU-Press-styleguide...
Maybe at FOSDEM this year, people could do a Hackathon and knock out some basics, like defining acronyms or using terms only after they're defined.
PS: every Python tarball for quite a while has instructions for building the documentation, including in info format
RnRS - Revised n Report on Scheme (where 1 <= n <= 7)
These are basically Scheme Editions. R5RS, R6RS, and R7RS are the ‘big ones’ that are commonly referenced, R7RS being issued in 2013 (5 — 1998, 6 — 2007).
SRFI - Scheme Request for Implementation
SFRI is basically an informal standards type document. SFRI’s are typically used to request a common library feature for implementation (more useful before R6RS which essentially introduces a functioning standard library for scheme. Most implementations acknowledge that they implement SFRI #n as a quick reference for what ‘extras’ are in their shipped stdlib.
Note that I think parent may have been rhetorically asking, or asking with heavy sarcasm. Also, I agree that the Manual is not written that well. It is pretty big, but if Guile is going to continue playing a role as the ‘Scheme of Record’ in GNU and in Linux more generally, it should meet modern expectations for documentation.
Probably neither. It is what you ask when you read the guile manual. Scheme documentation in general is surprisingly bad, considering how simple it is compared to a complex language like Rust for instance. Books like SICP are good for the academically inclined, but are too verbose for anyone learning scheme for a specific purpose like scripting.
Now apart from that I enjoyed the article advocating for guile. I thought it made some compelling points.
Software is art. Maybe someone out there somehow gets 10xd from these traits, but highly unlikely
The real productivity benefit for me is that the ecosystem is so stable and well documented. You can learn it all and keep it in your head.
License problems too, if you're not making copyleft software. Guile is GPL, both Luas are MIT.
(I have been enjoying Elixir too, but at the end of the day it doesn’t quite sit right with me — just feels a bit clunky. Gleam seems an attractive alternative though. The BEAM rocks, but it is a heavy dependency that doesn’t fit all distribution needs.)
One funny thing I just noticed: I am not the only one often mistyping "PFDS" as "PDFs" (usually in lowercase though). On IJP's repo for "fectors":
> One such implementation is based on fingertrees and is provided as part of my pdfs package[1]