On 9 Sep 2009, at 5:59 pm, Eli Barzilay wrote: > And the result is that "Scheme" *is* sitting around, looking beautiful > to people who like the 70s, and justifying every student that ever > complained about learning a language that has no connection to the > real world.
Pessimism! I've seen much good practical work done in Scheme. Not very much, I agree, but certainly not none... The main reason for Scheme not being more widespread is one of public image, rather than truth. If I weren't working six days and four evenings a week already, I could go and write a "practical programming in Chicken Scheme" book (purely because I know that implementation well), detailing how to write serious programs to do serious things with Chicken's extensive library of contributed eggs. I don't know if I'd get it published, but there is a recent fashion for non-mainstream languages; O'Reilly has Erlang and Haskell books out, and I see mention of Lisp books appearing soon, so I reckon I'd be in with a chance. Just it sucks that I'd have to write it "for Chicken". If I tried to write it for all implementations, it'd be full of "For PLT write (foo), for Chicken write (bar), for Gauche ..."; a practice which reminds me fondly of Teach Yourself BASIC books in my childhood, which had an appendix at the back saying what lines in the listings needed changing for each major micro on the market. As it stands, there are languages called "Chicken Scheme", "Gauche", etc. And that's just a shame, because they have so much in common - R5RS and SRFIs, currently - that the differences between them (at the one end, how to talk to platform features like sockets; at the other end, how to structure a large program into modules) are arbitrary impediments to portability. We need to keep it beautiful, because that makes programming more productive. But that's in no way contradictory to making it practical. ABS -- Alaric Snell-Pym Work: http://www.snell-systems.co.uk/ Play: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/ Blog: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/author/alaric/ _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
