[gambit-list] Truck-Factor by mtov

William Soukoreff william at soukoreff.com
Thu Jul 23 22:58:13 EDT 2015



> Sadly have to do something to make a living after graduation :(

As a graduate student I always felt poor and hard pressed for time (didn't we all?), I had no idea how much worse things would get after graduation (in terms of time and money to pursue one's own interests)...  still, Gambit is simply too cool not to try to push some part of it forward.

I think that the discussion between Marc and Bradley is very interesting;  reminds me of debates along the line of "the code's not done until it's documented" versus "the code IS the documentation", that crop up in smaller coding shops all the time.  I've been snooping through the Gambit code for a while now, and I've crawled through LambdaNative in detail (LN has fantastic potential as a development platform - but I agree with Bradley - it wasn't easy to get started).

It is not clear to me how to contribute to documentation in a maintainable way.  It sucks documenting code that changes under one's feet - that's just wasted effort.  I guess my two big questions regarding documentation are:

What is expected in terms of documentation?  Is there any part of the Gambit code that is adequately documented, so I can see what people are hoping for?

What would have the most impact - commenting inside the source code, or external documentation (perhaps a wiki), or something hybrid, like encoded comments inside the source code that could be "compiled" to viewable comments, similar to, for example, Javadocs)?

In terms of development, I think that a lot of momentum could be leveraged from having useful libraries available for Gambit.  I haven't looked at define-library, but does it represent a forward-looking means to build libraries?  It's unfortunate that scheme hasn't really resolved the module / library issue in a widely-standardised way - this inhibits library development.  (Viva SchemeSpheres!)






On Thu, July 23, 2015 5:58 pm, Meng Zhang wrote:
> Yeah a deep understanding of Gambit internal system would be really 
> helpful when dealing with any macrology / module systems..
> 
> My last attempt was mostly an rewrite against riaxpander line by line in 
> gambit and it's <https://github.com/wsxiaoys/nova/blob/master/nova.scm> 
> mostly working (successfully loading chibi's init.scm and passed its r7rs
> test suite). While to produce more informative syntax mistake, it needs
> work to dive into gambit's source handling & internal symbols
> management..
> 
> Sadly have to do something to make a living after graduation :(
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Álvaro Castro-Castilla <alvaro.castro.castilla at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 10:54 PM, Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Jul 23, 2015, at 3:24 PM, Bradley Lucier <lucier at math.purdue.edu> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> How does one use the "define-library" form?  Is there documentation
>>>> 
>>> somewhere, or does one just guess from the examples in that git 
>>> repository?
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I think the topic of this thread is very important indeed. I completely
>> relate to Marc's position: there is only so much you can do. And 
>> eventually we all have to do something to make a living, which
>> unfortunately for many of us is not 100% Gambit-related.
>> 
>> Also, SchemeSpheres is ready to use R7RS as soon as Gambit implements 
>> it. It sits a layer above that, and uses a custom version of psyntax
>> and R7RS to get the minimal support to be functional and usable now.




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