The whole world should be using Scheme | Hacker News Reader

The whole world should be using Scheme

8 pointsIxiaus6 comments

Just a silly post, nothing very stimulating. I have spent the last month and a half learning Clozure Common Lisp.

A cool implementation to be sure (it has an amazing wealth of integration with Obj-C on the Mac which is my platform). But, holy god Common Lisp is messy! SLIME? Why? I just want the interpreter running in a buffer along side the file I am editing! No need for all of the crazy connection routines.

Scheme is slim, and so much more intuitive! QUACK + mzscheme is a breeze to get running in Emacs, loads quicker, and feels cleaner...

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That's a pretty broad claim!

The number of LISP dialects and derivatives is pretty impressive, someone ought to make a table that compares them side-by-side so you can select the one that is right for what you want to do.

How broadly applicable is the QUACK + mzscheme combination ?

Would you be able to write a web application in it that serves up dynamic content to a large number of users (a la HN, or larger, and without peeking at the arc sources ;) ) ?

Would you be able to make it run on an embedded platform ?

Use it as a scripting language from the command line to access a database or a filesystem and do a bunch of stuff ?

These are all common and everyday activities and I'm wondering how difficult it would be to put scheme to work on problems like that.

True, I was having an emotional moment after getting QUACK + mzscheme setup.

As far as I know, the QUACK + mzscheme combo should work wherever you can have a running instance of Emacs and mzscheme. It seems to do the job pretty well. Running mzscheme with the errortrace argument and a few modifiers returns a full debug backtrace for errors...

Worth while questions though. I do, however, find the cleanliness of a programming language an attractor/deterrent to my learning it. Common Lisp is pretty crufty.

I imagine Scheme is certainly better suited to running as an embedded than CL.

Either way, learning the language first is my concern for educational reasons; making it useful is my secondary concern.

> learning the language first is my concern for educational reasons; making it useful is my secondary concern.

I'm in the opposite boat, I have to somehow make my time earn me a living, it's hard to justify time out for pure educational reasons (even if I do smuggle a bit here and there).

Great to see you happy about learning a new language though, you can never have enough of those under your belt.

Especially when they're off the beaten path.

Yeah, I have no debt and no dependencies so I left my job to pursue self education and personal projects.

Thanks for the vote of confidence :)

There'll never be a language that "the whole world should be using." What's optimal for one problem WILL be a poor choice for another problem.

Not to mention wide variations in the capabilities of programmers.

Slime is one of the things I miss most when writing scheme.

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