Re: Ideas for making Guile easier to approach

[paul]

Hey all,

Just a rando on the internet, but wanted to chime in and express 
my support for the idea of low-hanging fruit fixes to make Guile 
more approachable.  Since nobody else called it out yet,

On 2022-02-09 at 10:18 -05, quoth Christine Lemmer-Webber 
<cwebber@dustycloud.org>:
> [...]
> ice-9 -> guile
> --------------
>
> I think that ice-9 is a weird namespace for "guile's standard 
> library"
> but it's what we have for historical reasons.  Still I would 
> have
> preferred that namespace simply be "guile", so we have (guile 
> match) and
> (guile format) instead of (ice-9 ...).  It would be clearer what 
> ice-9
> *is* to have it be called "guile" instead.  But maybe it's too 
> late for
> that.  How much work would it be to do an alias like this?
> [...]

I wanted to say that i found this extremely baffling, too.  I 
initially assumed `ice-9` must be somebody's side-project to add 
"helpful features" to the Guile stdlib, and searched around a bit 
and (predictably) found a reference to a scifi novel i was unaware 
of.  I dismissed that out of hand because surely "ice" in the 
context of Guile must stand for something else, but a few weeks 
later i decided to search this very mailing list archive, finding 
lo and behold, `ice-9` _is_ in fact the stdlib :).  As a Guile 
newbie myself, i agree that it'd be immensely easier to grok 
what's going on if we're presented with module names such as 
Christine suggests.

I didn't think to mention my confusion because..  well, i'm just 
the peanut gallery.  But i won't miss the opportunity to say "i 
agree"! :)

All the best to everyone reading,
paul