Re: How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hi Fannys,

Fannys <email@fannys.me> writes:

> Ekaitz Zarraga <ekaitz@elenq.tech> writes:
>
>>> > This is what I mean when I say many times emacs is kind of mandatory,
>>> > and
>>> > this thread is kind of a demonstration of what I meant because the main
>>> > discussion evolved to: you can use this or that in emacs to ease the
>>> > dev
>>> > experience.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> One of the benefits of my being able to attend Guix Days was seeing
>>> peoples' workflows and stacks in person.
>>> 
>>> As such, one of my conclusions having (already) committed to Guix was
>>> that I needed to master Emacs prior to Guile
>>> (Im highly flow orientated).
>>
>> But again, even if this is a great option for you, it might be a really bad
>> option for some other people. Everybody does not have the time to spend
>> learning emacs, or other specific tool. It's ok if the workflow suggests that
>> but it's not great if we have no other alternative.
>>
>> It's not accessible and imposes a barrier in some people.
>
> Yeah agreed. And we should be consious of that.
> Ironically by mandating Emacs and Email we force people to use specific
> tools while at the same time even though the same people will complain(!) 
> against vendor lock-in
> like github.

There's no lock-in.  You can use any tool you want.  Most people hacking
on Guix do so with Emacs and Geiser because these are currently the best
tools (that I know of) to do the job; these are the tools many of us
know and can easily recommend.  If Visual Code (or editor X) was
packaged in Guix and had great support for working with Guile, we could
also mention it in our manual or in the cookbook.

Notice I use recommend rather than mandate; these are just
recommendations that try to be helpful.  If it's not helpful to you, you
are free to select your own tool box and share how it works (via patches
to the contributing section or a blog post for example).

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim