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Comment by Lyngbakr | Hacker News Reader

Are you using Scheme in production? I'm super curious about it being applied in the "real world", as I'm currently working my way through SICP.

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No way. Scheme is hobbyist language at this point.

Simply put difference between a 'hobbyist' and professional language for me is the strength and depth of the packaging ecosystem.

So as soon as you need to do things like open and parse PDF, implement TLS/SSL, create a dashboard,... you will be in trouble pretty quick in scheme. Probably simple stuff like handling unicode would be shaky.

Afaik racket can do all of what you have mentioned. I have run a few slightly non trivial dev systems using it with good success. Ofc, company never knew about it.

Nobody would re-implement TLS in a garbage collected language, at least if they planned to use it. There are libraries for that. And who kn their right mind would implement PDF parsing themselves? The more I familiarise myself with the PDF format the happier I am with the libraries that exist.

I did write a web app that served a couple of hundred people with information, chats and live updates at a conference a friend was hosting. It was written in guile and made heavy use of delimited continuations which is probably my favourite way of handling state on the web. The main logic was less than 2000 lines, so it was by no means a large project.

What about the unicode handling would be shaky? And why do you say handling unicode is simple?? :)

Nope. I am not a programmer, except for that time I got paid to write common lisp. The only thing except that I have done for money is some data processing using python.

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