Re: Ideas for making Guile easier to approach

[Chris Vine]

On Wed, 09 Feb 2022 10:18:27 -0500
Christine Lemmer-Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:
>  - Racket also separates the "Guide" from the "Reference".  Well that's
>    sensible!  Guile actually has a very good "reference manual", maybe
>    what it needs is a *companion* in terms of the "Guile Guide".

I think that is right.

I agree with the rest of your analysis except possibly as regards Wisp,
which I am not a great fan of, and as regards Racket, about which I know
little and am not qualified to have a view.  The success of python as
compared with other dynamically typed languages such as guile and the
other schemes (which for the most part run considerably faster than
python) may be down to its more approachable syntax than scheme's
sexpressions, but I think there is probably more to it than that and
anyway that ship has now sailed.  I positively like sexpressions.  (I
could be wrong about my view on this so I wouldn't want to stand in the
way of a greater push for Wisp. But ocaml with the other MLs has a
syntax which many dislike but ocaml's Reason alternative does not appear
to have been much of a success either.)

Python was I think better marketed as a tool anyone could use, is
reasonably easy for novice programmers to get a grip of and has
developed the critical mass to give it an advantage over other dynamic
languages.  Scheme/guile on the hand in the past has perhaps cultivated
the wizardish SICP ethos.  And at the end of it scheme is in the main a
functional programming language even though it has mutation and has
dallied with common lispish things like GOOPS (which I don't like).
Many programmers find functional programming confusing.  Javascript and
python have reached a sort of middle ground on that which maybe eludes
scheme.