Re: Proposal: Deep Dive into the Guile Docs & Makeover Proposal

[Daniel Tornabene]

Very much agree with "How to setup a project" example, I should consider
offering my own example at some point after Blake has worked through his
approach.  Really onboard with this comment overall, the fact that C
interop is included directly in the manual is important, and something I've
been meaning to write about myself from a different direction for some time
now, and I wasn't even aware of the catch/throw change, a perfect thing to
highlight or restructure.

On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 10:13 AM Olivier Dion via General Guile related
discussions <guile-user@gnu.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 08 Feb 2022, Blake Shaw <blake@nonconstructivism.com> wrote:
> > * SUMMARY: Recent discussions on the Guix mailing list revealed that
> > many in the Guix community have found the Guile Reference Manual
> > difficult to navigate as newcomers. That should come as no surprise --
> > in PDF form, the docs span approximately /850 pages/, making it a
> > quite hefty set of documents for an implementation of a minimal
> > programming language like Scheme, even when compared to the
> > documentation of relatively large PLs; the Racket Guide, for instannce,
> > is only 450 pages, while the Rust Book is approximately 550 pages.
>
> Don't forget that Guile as a lot of legacy stuff in its manual.  For
> example `catch/throw` -- the old way of doing exception, althought it's
> not clear what new projects should use -- is documented there.  There's
> also the details of its implementation, indices, appendices, functions
> in C, many SRFI and modules.  So it's true that scheme is a very simple
> language, but Guile is not only Scheme.
>
> I think there's certainly things that could be trim away to save some
> space, maybe some restructuration, but I think that overall the manual
> is great when you get use to it.
>
> In my opinion, the thing that lack in the manual is a complete "How to
> setup a project" example that is a more complex project than the tortoise
> tutorial.  Having this section with condensed informations would be
> easier for newbies than sparsed informations across hundreds of pages.
> I had to learn that the hardway by reading multiple times the manual, and
> looking at Guix and Guile source code.
>
> --
> Olivier Dion
> Polymtl
>
>