After a few weeks with Guile I can now do with Scheme what I used to do with org-mode. The work flow is still in emacs but with the Geiser and shell modes there is less overhead. With less overhead it is easier to focus on the data, the solutions, and learning Guile Scheme with emacs as a second language. Typing data into Lisp lists may be simpler than working with tables, even org-table which seem to have so much less overhead than office software spreadsheets.

With free software, even irritating administrative work demanded by bureaucracy can be fun. With some time and free approach, bureacracy doesn't have to make us stupid all the time.(fn:1)

Later I will show how to convert a csv data file to associative lists, but for now this script is an example of getting data(lists) from a file(port) and using the file name and data to generate an html page with sxml. I took me a while to get used to opening ports, and to remember to set their encodings to overcome issues with Japanese characters.

At first glance the sxml->xml and backquoting seemed overwhelming, but after some immersion experiences, mapping over lists to generate markup becomes second nature. If you see a lot of (quote (unquote ... in the generated sxml, it means that you typed a single-quote “ ' ” instead of a back-tick “ ` “.