Full name : Emmanuel Medernach Location : France
Statement of interest : I first learned about Scheme because I was (and still are) dissatisfied with mainstream languages. Many of them feel to me as convoluted hack, making ideas laborious or verbose to express and making people think coding is mainly about tinker instead of thinker. On the contrary Scheme immediately strucked me because of both its elegance and expressiveness. I then carry on reading the famous Lambda papers (and some other papers from the readscheme website) which were enligthening and great readings. So Scheme is my language of choice for expressing my ideas and fast prototyping them. And even if in some project I cannot use it as it deserved to be (my job is to work as a computer research engineer in physics lab), I try to follow its philosophy each time I could. Vote: yes Rationale: - Does it satisfy the requirements of the WG1 charter ? I believe the followings are true: "Extensible" "Facilitate sharing of Scheme code" "Intended for use in education, programming-language research, etc." "Easy to learn and understand" "Mostly compatible, and comparable in size, with R5RS." About the library decisions, I think that removing versioning and phasing from WG1 was a "necessary" step to have a simpler module system. The module system was chosen to be static which make it a good base for language extension. About the error system decision IMHO the main R6RS issue was to write in stone an arbitrary condition hierarchy, which were incompatible with everything existing at that time and thus too early to standardize. About the record system decision, IMHO the R6RS one feels like a "least common multiple" approach was taken instead of a "orthogonal concept decomposition". I am convinced that Scheme needs diversity (of record system for instance) instead of unification. - My view about the work of Working Group 1 We had to deal with a sensitive subjet as to find a balance between existing implementation practices and standardization effort. Concessions were inevitables. As such I think the voting process has been a success as we all had the opportunity to express opinions and to read others point of view, which is interesting and enriching. Of course I have a list of issues: I am not quite happy with the interaction between exception system and dynamic wind/continuations (somewhere something orthogonal must be missing). I strived for removal of the dreaded "unspecified value" in favor of allowing no value to be returned, but without success for now. I view making SRFI-9 "The One True Scheme Record" as a bad decision, I admit it is widespread and should have been standardized but as a module instead. I dislike having parameters inside the core language: however convenient there are I think promoting them is a bad idea. But all in all I am very satisfied with the outcome and want to give thanks to all participants for their work and patience. -- Emmanuel Medernach
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