Re: [Chicken-users] Parsing HTML, best practice with Chicken

[Peter Bex]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 11:49:32AM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> First, to lighten up spirits a bit: at least for me it was easier to start
> with Chicken than with Clojure.

That's good news :)

> That being said, I think it is hard to compete against Python in terms of
> documentation, number of packages, scope of usage, integrated IDE (IDLE),
> community size and number of stackoverflow questions/answers.

That's just a matter of people.  They (still) have more :)

> What would certainly help would be
> 
> -- give more examples on how one would solve problems with Chicken. This
> especially applies to the eggs. I think this is a very important point,
> since sometimes I do feel very lost when reading through the egg
> documentation. I understand that the fact that many eggs have their own
> domain specific language does not make this easy, but IMHO it is necessary
> to have at least two trivial and a couple of more complicated use cases
> for an egg.

Can you name some eggs that you looked at where you missed some examples?
Several eggs do have examples, but certainly not all.

> -- a guide to its package ecosystem, with some idea which packages would
> be recommended, and which may have been forgotten and may not be up to
> date.

Something like that would necessarily be a pretty subjective view.
Having a list of forgotten or not up-to-date packages is also hard; if a
package hasn't been updated in two years, is it forgotten or not up-to-date?
I'm sure some authors would be offended if you told them their packages are
"forgotten" :)

We do try to mark packages as "obsolete" (which is the category under they
are listed on the egg overview page)

> -- an instruction how to get a running IDE with a REPL. I really struggled
> here (Sublime Text 2, EMACS).

In emacs that's just M-x run-scheme AFAIK.  Perhaps you can write up a
small tutorial so you can highlight the points with which you struggled
personally.  At some point, experienced user become "blind" to the
problems because they know where to find everything and what landmines
to step over.

> -- provide easier access to Chicken and egg sources.

Like Evan asked, can you be more precise?  The page with links to the
git repo and source tarballs are linked right on the front page.  Perhaps
we could make the page a little easier to scan, though.

Putting the egg repository location on the egg page is a responsibility
of each egg author.  True, if an egg is in subversion we tend not to list
that, but maybe we should start doing so now that it's no longer the
obvious place to look.

> -- some good pointers where to learn the SCHEME language (beginners,
> intermediate, experienced level).

Our wiki and website really could use an overhaul.

> -- a restructured website. Although this is certainly a very minor point,
> but I think the Chicken site should really help to get going with scheme
> straight away, and not require a user to search the internet, this
> excellent mailing list or stackoverflow for possible hints.

Agreed.  I'll give a new homepage some thought.

> Sorry that I was not more constructive, but I hope you can see where my
> problems lie.

Yeah, it's a bit vague, but it's the website and docs as a whole that are
badly structured.

Thanks for your feedback, we'll try to use it to improve things.  This
will probably take a while though, as we're all very busy.

If someone is reading this and thinks "I have some design/information
architecture skills", please consider contributing in this way, that's
at least as useful as contributing code right now!

Cheers,
Peter

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