Like Guile itself, the Guile reference manual is a living entity, cared for by many people over a long period of time. As such, it is hard to identify individuals of whom to say “yes, this single person wrote the manual.”
Still, among the many contributions, some caretakers stand out. First among them is Neil Jerram, who has worked on this document for over ten years. Neil’s attention both to detail and to the big picture have made a real difference in the understanding of a generation of Guile hackers.
Next we should note Marius Vollmer’s effect on this document. Marius maintained Guile during a period in which Guile’s API was clarified—put to the fire, so to speak—and he had the good sense to effect the same change on the manual.
Martin Grabmueller made substantial contributions throughout the manual in preparation for the Guile 1.6 release, including filling out a lot of the documentation of Scheme data types, control mechanisms and procedures. In addition, he wrote the documentation for Guile’s SRFI modules and modules associated with the Guile REPL.
Ludovic Courtès and Andy Wingo, who co-maintain Guile since 2010, along with Mark Weaver, have also made their dent in the manual, writing documentation for new modules and subsystems that arrived with Guile 2.0. Ludovic, Andy, and Mark are also responsible for ensuring that the existing text retains its relevance as Guile evolves. See Reporting Bugs, for more information on reporting problems in this manual.
The content for the first versions of this manual incorporated and was inspired by documents from Aubrey Jaffer, author of the SCM system on which Guile was based, and from Tom Lord, Guile’s first maintainer. Although most of this text has been rewritten, all of it was important, and some of the structure remains.
The manual for the first versions of Guile were largely written, edited, and compiled by Mark Galassi and Jim Blandy. In particular, Jim wrote the original tutorial on Guile’s data representation and the C API for accessing Guile objects.
Significant portions were also contributed by Thien-Thi Nguyen, Kevin Ryde, Mikael Djurfeldt, Christian Lynbech, Julian Graham, Gary Houston, Tim Pierce, and a few dozen more. You, reader, are most welcome to join their esteemed ranks. Visit Guile’s web site at http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/ to find out how to get involved.