On 22/02/08 02:36pm, Blake Shaw wrote: > > Dear Guix (and guile users, who I've Cc'd), > > My apologies for turning this in last minute. There had been discussion about > this proposal on the guix mailing list, and I had missed that I need to > submit a formal proposal until roptat mentioned it at Fosdem. Nonetheles here > it is: > > * TITLE: A Deep Dive into the Guile Documentation & Makeover Proposal > * FORMAT: Standard Talk > * LENGTH: Approximately 30 minutes (pre-recorded) > > * SUMMARY: > Recent discussions on the Guix mailing list revealed that many in the Guix > community have found the Guile Reference Manual difficult to navigate as > newcomers. That should come as no surprise -- in PDF form, the docs span > approximately /850 pages/, making it a quite hefty set of documents for an > implementation of a minimal programming language like Scheme, even when > compared to the documentation of relatively large PLs; the Racket Guide, for > instance, is only 450 pages, while the Rust Book is approximately 550 pages. > > Serving at once as a referrence manual & API specification, the large size > may in part be attributed to what simultaneously makes Guile an appealing > project to contribute to, while also rendering the documentation process > somewhat delicate: Guile is a massive collective project featuring the > contributions of many authors over the course of three decades, contributions > which Guilers would hate to trivialize or treat as insignificant or edit away > on a whim. Additionally, Guile comes from a long set of traditions within > Scheme hacking which itself is deep with sage wisdom spanning many > pedagogical philosophies and one of the greatest literature traditions of > hacker culture. Is it possible to perform a makeover of the Guile > Documentation while respecting these historical threads, at once rendering it > more approachable for new users while not forsaking the deep nuggets of > wisdom that lie therein? > > Since mid-December I have been mulling over these questions as newcomer, both > studying & analyzing the docs, and trying to come to grips with it's > strengths and shortcomings. For this talk, I will present my research to the > Guix community, culminating with a plan for a full makeover of the existing > docs which would respect the above concerns. I will use the 5 minute > presentation to focus on the plan of action, with hopes that during the Q&A > we can come to consensus on what is to be done. The decisions made by the > group will form the basis of a proposal to be made to the Guile community, > and once everyone is in agreement with plans for how to move forward I will > undertake the effort to implement the makeover proposal. > > Additionally, as a newcomer to Guix, I will use the first 10 minutes of my > talk to briefly introduce my work and how I'm using Guix & Guile to create a > remotely deployed large-scale public interactive video mapping installation > commissioned by the city of Singapore which will be installed in Marina Bay > at the heart of the city this summer for 8 weeks from June - August 2022. > > * BIO: > Blake Shaw is a media artist and theorist most well known as one of the > founders of the SWEATSHOPPE urban media art collective. His works have been > shown in over 40 cities on every continent of the world (excluding > Antarctica) at venues including: The Venice Biennale (2017), The Brooklyn > Museum, Akademie de Kunste Berlin, The Museum of the Moving Image, The > Biennial of the America, Luminato (Toronto), The Media Architecture Biennale, > and the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. His work have been featured in > publications including The New York Times and the Atlantic, and online they > have been viewed over 30 million times across various channels. He holds a > Masters degree in Philosophy from the EGS Switzerland, and was pursuing a PhD > in the Philosophy of Mathematics under the supervision of Boris Groys prior > to the COVID-19 pandemic. >
I too would like to state my interest in your talk. As someone who is relatively new to GNU Guile, I definitely see the interest in such a discussion as I do my self sometimes find the documentation a bit hard to navigate although I don't claim to have any knowledge of the history surrounding it. It does seem like a large, and perhaps a difficult task to produce a talk on the subject so I would very much be interested in seeing it.