Re: [ANN] An impudent introduction to Guile

[Panicz Maciej Godek]

Hi Amirouche,

thanks for these nice words!

2016-02-05 19:55 GMT+01:00 Amirouche Boubekki <address@hidden>:

I skimmed over the book and it's really good, my take away:

- I should probably study better how you introduce match

I have to admit that I've rushed off with the patern matcher rather quickly, but I hope that the equivalent formulations without the "match" will suffice as an explanation. If you have any specific questions or remarks, I'd be eager to answer them

 

- I learned new ways to create specification and apply algorithms
- The subject is *very* interesting

Also maybe to make the book even more interesting for people that want
to decide between s/scheme/guile (!) and R: add extra illustrations for
each chapter.

I think it would be great. I've put some plots here and there, but certainly illustrations would appeal to imagination and let the mind relax a little.

 

It can be nice to have more examples of what a particular
algorithm can be used for. I mean exercices without solution (yet).

This is a very good idea. Solutions could also be put at the end of the book later. I also thought about adding an appendix regarding the hygienic macros and those syntax extensions that were used with the sample code, so maybe I will add it later (I decided to try to prepare a talk for this year's European Lisp Symposium, so I will probably be a bit busy in the upcomming two weeks)

A chapter about Natural Language Processing/Understading would have been
extra nice, but I'm not sure it's doable in this format.

Well, I agree that it's an extremely interesting topic, but also very broad indeed, and it is a little unclear what the goals shoud be.

I recenntly saw Richard Gabriel's keynote talk from ELS 2014 and it was very inspiring:
http://medias.ircam.fr/x03b42f

Perhaps it would be instructive to implement an Inform 7-alike programming language that would translate to Scheme. It would be pretty much in the spirit of the pamphlet.

 

All the best!

Thanks, take care!