On Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:18:07 -0400, Grant Rettke <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Antonio Vieiro<[email protected]> > wrote: > > Antonio touched on a key point here, if the goal of the > standardization is to grow Scheme's industrial use then a single > library implementation will play a key part in that happening. Just > imagine a conversation where the programmers exclaims that "Sure we > can use Scheme, there are thousands of people using the codebase so > the bugs have been worked out": > > That is the plan according to the large language announcement, but, > does this sort of go against the culture where everyone implements > everything themselves? (Is that assumption even accurate?) I don't think Schemers want to implement everything themselves any more than they have to. One of the problems I see is that people haven't made a concerted effort to develop good, useful, portable libraries in Scheme. This is an attitude, and you can't expect a lot of good things to come out of standardizing unless people are willing to write portable libraries to begin with. Some people have done this, but that doesn't make it widespread. The standards process isn't the only way we can help Scheme. We can help by making the libraries that already exist more visible (such as with Descot), and we can make a systematic effort at providing well designed and abstracted libraries that make it easy to deal with non-standard features. It can be done, and it should be done. When people see all the libraries that are out there, and start using them or trying to use them, we can start getting more minds on making and improving the code out there, and we don't even need to bother with standards at first. Just write the code! Once the code is written, having the standard is just convenience afterwards. A good convenience, to be sure, but let us not put the cart before the horse. Aaron W. Hsu -- Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. -- C. S. Lewis _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
