Re: Newbie thoughts on Guile Hall + Guix

[Chris Vine]

On Tue, 08 Feb 2022 19:19:06 +0700
Blake Shaw <blake@nonconstructivism.com> wrote:

> Vijay Marupudi <vijaymarupudi@gatech.edu> writes:
> > I don't think it's fair to say that using packages in Guile just as
> > easy/hard as other languages. Python / Javascript make this incredibly
> > easy, and their ecosystem is evidence for that success. Their package
> > managers have flaws, but they have benefits too, and those benefits
> > would be great for Guile.
> 
> I would just like to tag onto this convo that I agree that its not fair
> to say that Guile is easy and will quickly bless those who endeavor to
> learn it with superpowers. My experience w/Racket was very smooth and I 
> got working in it very quickly. I was a contracted to work on a project in
> Python a few months ago and without ever studying it I was able to 
> start doing production work in it (ridiculous how intuitive it is,
> really). Before I started learning Guile I read Edwin Brady's book on
> Idris and found Idris much easier to get from start to end of small
> projects I was working on (because there is a well written book on it).
> 
> While Guile has become my favorite programming language, it took me
> several months to learn how to navigate & figure out how to navigate the
> SRFIs, how to plan a program so that I can know what to expect along the
> way (what features I'll need to implement myself, etc) before I was able
> to get productive in it beyond the realm of Guix. And I think most would
> agree that Scheme is a less advanced language than Idris (I did some
> category theory in school so I have some intuition for the ideas, but
> still). And to be honest, I still hit plenty of road blocks.
> 
> There were definitely some times where I was digging around trying to
> figure out how to do things and came across messages in the archives
> saying "its so easy you just do [vague hand wavy explanation]". And I
> found that quite frustrating, like there is an insularity meant to weed
> out the bad apples. And when this topic popped up on the guix list a few
> weeks ago some others expressed similar concerns, folks who are doing
> very impressive work. A programming language should never make
> programmers feel dumb -- it should make us feel empowered!

Everything is capable of improvement but the guile manual is a manual
and not I think primarily intended as a language tutorial (although
Chapter 3 of the manual does have a very cursory introduction to the
scheme language).  If you are looking for a tutorial, I suggest reading
https://www.scheme.com/tspl4/ .  It covers the R6RS flavour, but at the
tutorial level I don't think the various current standard flavours
(R5RS, R6RS and R7RS) matter too much.

I would be reluctant to see the manual turned into a tutorial if that
were to mean abridging any of its current completeness.