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Comment by codygman | Hacker News Reader

> rather than going from a poor-but-performant systems programming language like C to a pedagogic language like Scheme, it’d be a better idea to move to an rich-and-performant language meant for industrial systems programming like Common Lisp.> Scheme’s a pretty little language, but it’s not meant for building large applications.

Weren't people saying the same about python and Java long ago?

How do you arrive at that conclusion?

> Indeed, elisp’s weaknesses are IMHO mainly where it’s most akin to Scheme (e.g. its flat namespace)

Racket at least wasnt flat iirc, is guile scheme?

> The great thing about a JIT is that we get a speedup without changing the actual implementation language or fragmenting the ecosystem.

Agreed.

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> > Scheme’s a pretty little language, but it’s not meant for building large applications.

> Weren't people saying the same about python and Java long ago?

I spent roughly a decade as a professional Python developer, and in retrospect I’d probably agree that it’s not well-suited to large applications. Why, exactly, is for another discussion.

As for Java — it’s certainly not meant for building small ones!

> How do you arrive at that conclusion?

The same way that the Scheme committee did, when they came up with R6RS: by trying to use Scheme for large systems.

It lacks features which aid building large systems (e.g. namespaces); it lacks features which enable building industrial-strength systems (e.g. the Lisp condition system or CLOS); it has features which make code more complex and tend to hinder performance (e.g. call/cc); and it even has a broken feature (dynamic-wind).

Then there are things like: conflating functions, variables & all other names; breaking NIL into NIL, () & #f. Those are partly a matter of taste, but I think also an indication of Lisp’s pragmatic nature: in practice, doing things the Lisp way is better, even though in theory doing them the Scheme way is.

> Racket at least wasnt flat iirc, is guile scheme?

Racket isn’t Scheme anymore. That’s not a bad thing, and indeed Racket is pretty amazing. I wish that the same amount of effort had been expended making Lisp better, but everyone’s gotta scratch his own itch.

Well, in guile you get goops which is pretty much a clone of clos, call/cc is being phased out in guile since delimited continuations are the new black, unwind-protect is not enough in a language where you have first class continuations so the complexity of dynimic-wind is needed. For your escape continuation needs you can implement unwind-protect and very easily abstract away the parts of dynamic-wind you don't need.

The only thing missing is really the condition system, but that could be bolted on (that is the correct term) using continuations (preferably delimited). There is even a suggestion for r7rs-large to include them. I hope it gets voted in.

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