alt Hacker NewsRe: 8 complete info-manual
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
Replies
I have not read guile docs, but clear writing just doesnt get the emphasis it needs in engineering. Tla+, and Nvidia are two other software areas i sometimes wonder about. Also, when I use a product i want a user guide, technical guide, and a few white papers each in their own pdf. I do not want to see info atomized across 62 million links on 43 million different web pages. Part of clear communication is about composing the parts into a whole. Links ruin that.
Now apart from that I enjoyed the article advocating for guile. I thought it made some compelling points.
For those with no previous experience with Scheme, how does one learn Guile? Are there recommended books or MOOCs? Is familiarity with Emacs effectively a pre-requisite, as it happens with most open-source lisps?
In case someone is reading and wonders:
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.