Documentation proposal

[Martin Grabmueller <mgrabmue at cs dot tu-berlin dot de>]

Hello Guile fellows,

this is my first post to this list, so before I start, let me
introduce myself to make my point of view clear. I got interested in
Scheme (and later in Guile), because I liked clear and thought-out
programming languages ever since I started programming. 

My major concern with Guile is that I would really like to use it in
my day-to-day tasks, which mostly include scripting rather than using
it as an extension language.  I would really like to convince my
employer so that he would let me use Guile for my work, but for now I
have not yet been able to present anything useful to him ;)

The main reason is that I have found a lot of documentation out there
(both printed and on the web) that explained how to program "Hello
World" in Scheme, or how to implement nifty co-routines using
continuations.  In short, all I found was either too much oriented at
beginners, or climbed the towers of functional wisdom, at least it did
not help me with what I had on my mind. 

One exception I'd like to mention was "Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum
Days" by Dorai Sitaram. It is written well, and his examples are
comprehensive and up to the point. I would really like to see it
adapted to Guile, like someone mentioned on this list before.

This leads to my intention for this posting. It would be great to have
some HOWTO-style documentation covering things like scripting, network
programming or text file processing.  Of course, these are not the
things computer scientists are too excited about, but the majority of
programming tasks depend on stuff like that.

Now that I have figured out the basics of Scheme programming and how
to do basic system programming using Guile I would like to share my
experiences with all people out there. Right now, I haven't written
anything, but I have some ideas on my mind how to write a kind of
"Pragmatic Guile Programming Guide".

I don't feel very qualified neither in Scheme programming nor in
writing documentation, so I wanted to ask you for your opinion about
my idea before starting. Do you think this plan is worth it, and do
you think whether there is any sense in writing a tutorial "on the
fly", which means that I want to dig into this and while I do so, I
want to document my steps and experiences, and finally merge
everything into a kind of tutorial. 

This is not meant to be a general Scheme tutorial, because there are
plenty of them out there, but merely a tutorial which covers the
non-standard issues of writing programs using Guile.

Before I let you press the fast-reading-key #\d, let me join the
others who have expressed their sadness about Jim's announcement, even
though I do not stick around here long enough to remember the times
before he took over maintainership. Anyway, I always liked the tone on
this list, and that most certainly indicates that contributors and
users are satisfied with the maintainer's work.

Thanks for your patience,
  mgrabmue

-- 
Martin Grabmueller              mgrabmue@cs.tu-berlin.de
http://www.pintus.de/mgrabmue/  mgrabmue@#lkcc on EFnet