Hi Armando, thanks for your E-mail.
On Friday 04 Mar 2011 21:29:37 Armando Blancas wrote: > Have you look at Scsh? > > http://www.scsh.net/about/what.html > > It's not the most trendy, but being a Scheme at least is nice. > I've learned some SICP Scheme as part of reading the SICP courses and later on taking the two courses as part of my University B.Sc. (which proved to be enlightening on their own right, because when I read the book, I skipped over the exercises.). I see several problems with Scheme: 1. The standard library does not define or did not define many important primitives for handling files and directories, sockets, and other high level APIs: for GUIs, for writing server-side web-scripts (CGI/etc.), for unified database access (SQL/etc.), for client-side HTTP programming, etc. There are some implmentation-specific extensions for various Scheme implementations, but they are few and far between and don't reach the scope of Perl's CPAN or the Java Standard Library along with third party extensions such as Apache's Jakarta. 2. There are several competing Scheme implementations. While most Scheme implementations out there are sort of a proof-of-concept or rite-of-passage for every programmer (see: http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/Programs-Every-Programmer-has-Written/ ) there are still a proliferation of some highly developed ones which compete for the same mindshare and offer incompatible APIs. 3. The Scheme core language is very verbose by default. (My favourite Scheme expression is «(vector-set! myarray idx (1+ (vector-ref myarray idx)))». While this verbosity can be mitigated by writing many functions and macros, it still has a lot of initial overhead and as Larry Wall notes "programmers hate abstractions." and want things to be usable by default. 4. Finally, I should note that in general Scheme has a very impractical feel to it, and one gets the impression that they cannot use it for anything that is useful on a day to day programming. Read the links in the original message for more about that. Maybe it's just a feeling. ------------------------------- It seems that Clojure fares better on all of these points, so I think it can be a better basis for a scripting language. > Anyone capable of doing the job properly either won't take any money > or won't come cheap, so you might be better of offering a round of > beer or request bids. > If you want to do it in exchange for a T-shirt (your choice) and/or a beverage of your choice, then all the power to you. I can donate the money to ${their favourite charity}. Regards, Shlomi Fish [Trimming the quoted message]. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ List of Portability Libraries - http://shlom.in/port-libs My Commodore 64 is suffering from slowness and insufficiency of memory, and its display device is grievously short of pixels. Can anybody help? -- Omer Zak Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
