[plt-scheme] Re: Embarrasingly basic GUI question

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Matthew Flatt<mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> At Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:56:11 -0700 (PDT), Gregg Williams wrote:
>> As another newbie, I second this.

My stuff is 99% drawing code.

>> I have an extensive background as a technology writer/editor (BYTE
>> magazine, Apple Computer) and would be interested in writing
>> documentation to explain GUI code that someone else has written. It
>> would be great for someone to devise a list of sample programs that,
>> together, would get a beginner up and started writing GUI-based Scheme
>> programs. Then various people could commit to writing individual
>> programs and documenting them. If anybody's interested in this idea,
>> please let me know.
>
> That would be really great.

+1. I say just start it, and see what happens.

The Scheme Cookbook is quite a good system, but it doesn't really work
for large documents. Editing text in a browser text box just doesn't
scale. If what you have in mind is a coherent document rather than a
collection of short recipes, as in the Cookbook, my suggestions are:
1) use Scribble and 2) put the source on Github (yeah, I'm on a bit of
Github streak today). Git makes it easy... Ok Git makes nothing easy.
Git makes it possible for other people to branch and modify your text,
and you can selectively choose which parts to merge in. Very nice for
this sort of thing. If you don't like Git I hear good things about
Mercurial and Bazaar.

N.