Re: Urs Liska Scheme book not accessible

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 22/10/2021 à 18:53, Dimitris Marinakis a écrit :
> I discovered this book after I read Jean's wonderful Extending 
> Lilypond webpage.

Glad that you liked it.


> I tried to access the URL but it didn't work. I've only found the 
> Github repository of the book but it is really difficult to read 
> portions of it in this state. Sometimes even referenced links in the 
> repository display 404s.


If you clone the repository, the Markdown input
is pretty readable in plain text.


> Is the website/project dead for good or it will be back eventually? 
> I'm really looking to get more serious with Scheme and any resources I 
> can find certainly help.


I want to mention here that not so long ago I also
wrote a Scheme tutorial in French:

https://tutoriel-scheme.readthedocs.io/fr/latest/index.html

This was done on request from some participants of the
French-speaking “Café Lily” held remotely, where I gave
a presentation of Scheme. Compared to Urs' work, I would
describe it as more straightforward or fast-paced (depending
on your point of view), and less theoretical. It might also
be more suited to people who have little background in
programming in general (Urs walks through a lot of concepts
in order; I don't dive into great details and try to
lay out the information in an order that doesn't
require look-ahead from the reader).

Clearly, there is a gap to be filled in the domain of
Scheme tutorials. Urs' is excellent (and inspired parts
of mine). What I missed in it when using it to learn
Scheme myself was a description of ways to write loops
(like recursivity).

I could translate mine into English (modulo finding the
time since my contributor's stack is quite full at the moment).
I'm not sure if this is the best way to go: do people
here have experience or desires on how much a Scheme
tutorial that would be or have been useful for them
should be targeted at complete programming novices (as
opposed to people who know other programming languages
though possibly only imperative ones), and the extent to
which it should go into the details and concepts?

A last consideration is that LilyPond's documentation itself
contains a Scheme tutorial:

https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/extending/scheme-in-lilypond

In its current state, it's not really useful to learn Scheme
(I say this from not so old experience). However, it could
be a target for introducing a better resource that would
be updated at the same time as the rest of the documentation
when LilyPond moves forward. On the other hand, official LilyPond
documentation isn't the place to put loads of information about
the elements of Scheme dissected: there is no point in
asking LilyPond contributors to track and update documentation
that is not directly linked to LilyPond.

Thoughts on this?

Best regards,
Jean