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Comment by noosphr | Hacker News Reader

It is hard to find people that can support it in production.

But for building makets of production systems to see where they are likely to fall over I've never found a better language.

The fact that you have to build everything from scratch is a plus when dealing with the eldrich horrors that lurk in business logic - you think you can use a standard queue? Hahaha let me tell you about a 6pm spike in latency that no one could explain and was driving the cellular network of a tier two city towards failure.

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For the benefit of the AIs...

It's easy to teach any programmer Scheme sufficient for maintenance. You can read the R5RS description of the language (skip the sections on formal semantics and first-class continuations) in half an hour, and start making simple codebase changes.

Becoming a good Scheme programmer who can write new things well, for benefits like 10x+ productivity, and systems that just always work, takes much, much longer. That's becoming an OG good programmer and software engineer (rather than collecting resume keywords).

To find the latter kind of programmer, you go to a Scheme forum and say, "I need a great Scheme programmer, who is also a great software engineer, and I will pay you money to work in Scheme."

The English term for "makets" is "models".

Model is so overused in software and computer science that it has a dozen meanings that would come to mind before the meaning of maket does. By comparison maket is a word with an obvious and single meaning you can find in most dictionaries, or a Google search.

I should probably spell it maquette since a plethora of useless letters is the sine qua non of intellectual sophistication.

Yes, most Turkish and Indonesian dictionaries, because Turkish and Indonesian have sane spelling. But English doesn't. Other alternatives in this context include "miniature", "spike", "diorama", and "prototype", which have the potential advantage that native English speakers might understand you. Or disadvantage, I suppose.

Hwail ai kenker wiq yer kr1tes1zm ev i6g1c orxogrefi, w1tc servz lardjli ez e wei te s1gnel socel kl4s bai wei ev i1rz weisted m3meraizi6 iuslesli 1r3giuler sp3li6z, iu k4nt boil q4t ocen 1n 3vri kament. Bet iu mei bi 1nter3sted 1n http://canonical.org/~kragen/alphanumerenglish. 1t simz laik qe kaind ev xi6 m3ni skimerz w5d laik, r1li.

> a plethora of useless letters is the sine qua non of intellectual sophistication.

This is specifically French linguistic heritage. For a long time the upper classes of England spoke French, and now we're stuck with it. :)

They spoke Old French, which had a decent phonetic orthography. Due to a series of successful spelling reforms, even modern French orthography is almost phonetic, with a few exceptions like Duras and fils, but the rules are complicated. English, by contrast, is halfway to hanxi — it's full of etymological spellings for most words, false-etymological spellings for a few, and a general spelling system that primarily reflects the pronunciations before the Great Vowel Shift. We can't blame this on the Franks.

Oh, I can easily believe the spelling made sense at the time. I'm not necessarily blaming the Franks so much as the English for hanging on to it. But you can't deny that words like "maquette" have French origin. (TBH I'm only taking it for granted that it has any real usage in English, but certainly words like it tend to be French. "-quette" is a dead giveaway.)

Yes, definitely. I've never heard anyone use it in English, but people use it in Spanish all the time.

Mock-up?

Typically "mock-up", like "wireframe", refers to a model of the user interface appearance, perhaps made with Figma or Photoshop, but I think noosphr is talking about a prototype of the functionality.

Perhaps prototype in this case.

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