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Comment by garnet7 | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested in learning Scheme, and keeping my fingers crossed that they can come together and specify some kind of "batteries-included" standard library. Otherwise, I'm afraid I'll only be able to fiddle with Scheme for an hour or two on weekends and get my real work done with one of the "popular" languages (i.e., Perl, Python, etc.).

Yes, I realize PLT has some batteries included but I'd prefer a community standard rather than a one-distro standard (not that I think (or even have much of an idea if) anything is wrong with PLT).

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Your fingers are going to be crossed for a long time. I think the Steering Committee has too many divergent interests on it for there ever to be agreement on a serious standard library. Schemers are very DIY; for example, see http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware.... Rolling your own libraries on top of a tiny implementation is not particularly uncommon. (I just hope you can write more, uh, ethical software than that guy!)

PLT has the most batteries of any distro I've ever seen (disclaimer: one of its authors was my undergrad advisor). That is, PLT is (a) free, (b) mature, and (c) has a fair number of modules written by people other than the developers of the language.

There's no sense in waiting, just dive in. If you don't want to use PLT, Bigloo can call Java libraries---solving your battery problem in a different way.

> Your fingers are going to be crossed for a long time.

Hm. That's going to make it very difficult to type.

> I think the Steering Committee has too many divergent interests on it for there ever to be agreement on a serious standard library.

That would be most unfortunate.

> Schemers are very DIY; for example, see [snip]

Not sure what about that story points to Schemers being particularly DIY. Sounds like the fellow needed something tiny, so rather than take a full-blown batteries-included language and strip out what he didn't need, he instead just used something small that he was familiar with.

> There's no sense in waiting, just dive in.

Yeah. Trying to make the time... thanks for the encouragement. :)

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