Re: Ideas for a Guile tutorial to go with the new site

[BCG]

On 10/19/2015 12:29 PM, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
> Amirouche Boubekki writes:
>
> > To the contrary I think it's not a good idea to start upfront the
> > tutorial with which editor should be used is a good way to loose half of
> > the readers, because they will feel more uncomfortable and not up to the
> > task. To be useful emacs requires one 'Getting Started' tutorial in
> > itself. Or anykind of setup for that matter. The tutorial should go as
> > quickly as possible to the matter and start with coding.
> >
> > I started a tutorial at http://hypermove.net/. I don't introduce
> > readline until the user knows what the REPL is. Part 1 is all done in
> > REPL. I subtly introduce emacs as a good choice for an editor in part 2
> > which is done in an editor. But doesn't enforce it.
> Okay, sorry if I wasn't being clear... my goal in that section would be
> to encourage everyone who *isn't already an emacs user* to pick up a
> simple editor and know how to use that with Guile, but them give them a
> brief tip that they want to look into Emacs + Geiser once they've dived
> in a bit more deeply.
>
> I don't think this section needs to be too long.  I agree it should not
> be overwhelming.
Personally I would appreciate a not-so-brief tip.  Most resources on the 
web about coding in scheme seem to claim that emacs is the best 
environment for it, but rarely go into the reasoning about why or 
provide a focused way to get started with it.  I'd be happy to try out 
those tools, but it hardly is worth it to me to slog through the emacs 
tutorial just to see if I like whatever advantages it may have for 
coding Scheme.

After so many years of vi muscle memory I just can't find justification 
to slow down my productivity and learn emacs... but I wouldn't mind 
doing it just for Guile coding where I'm not really productive yet 
anyways - especially if there was getting started guide focused on that 
with pointers to other resources for a deeper dive if I like it.

Even if I didn't end up switching to emacs for everything, I may find 
that I want to use it just for Scheme... just like I fire up Eclipse 
when I want to work on Java, but I don't bother using Eclipse for 
anything else

It doesn't seem like a suggestion for a development environment should 
distract too much from a tutorial, but maybe that is too much to expect 
when your audience includes hackers. ;)

Just my opinion, which is worth what you paid for it.

-- Ben