For what it's worth, I like having the Guide and the Reference be separate things. They have different purposes and trying to mash them together is likely to make them worse at both.
The Guide is designed to introduce new concepts, give the reader basic familiarity, and clarify edge cases. The Reference is intended to be, well, a *reference*. It is concise and exhaustive. It requires a certain degree of familiarity to provide full value but once you have that familiarity it becomes invaluable. Perhaps there are places where a few more examples wouldn't hurt, but folding pages of soft-walk introduction into each section would be a waste. Either it's at the top and gets ignored when you're trying to look something up or it's inline and gets in the way. Perl has a philosophy that I think makes a great deal of sense: Everyone is a beginner at some point, but no one is a beginner forever and there are generally more non-beginners. It makes sense to optimize functionality and references for non-beginners and then provide separate materials to help beginners become non-beginners. On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 8:29 PM Hendrik Boom <hend...@topoi.pooq.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 06, 2019 at 06:33:11PM -0500, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > > > I think RnRS came across as "too academic", like "Holy crud! A > > function return is a call! OMG, we're all, like, cosmically connected, > > man... And a return is... a first class object?! WTH!" And the formal > > semantics -- which a PL grad student might interpret as rigor in > > underpinnings, could also just be intimidating and inaccessible to most > > practitioners, or give the impression of an impractical academic exercise -- > > that might've been the lethal finishing move, blocking earlier mainstream > > adoption. > > I was interested in Scheme a few decades ago as a small Lisp which I'd > have to implement myself. I could do tail-recursion. But returns > being first-class objects -- ouch. I did not have the resources or > methods to implement that efficiently. Machine too small, and > garbage-collection time wa already critical. > > Better methods are known now. > > I'd have an easier time of it now, but now, I wouldn't have to. > > -- hendrik > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Racket Users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
