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Comment by davexunit | Hacker News Reader

Since Clojure adoption is picking up, what about convincing management to use other Lisps now? Clojure is okay, but I much prefer Scheme (Guile, Racket, Chicken, etc.).

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Remember that the JVM is the major selling point for clojure. (that said there are many other lisps for the JVM)

Not only the JVM (which is rock-solid at this point) but also immutability, persistent data structures, the separation between values and identities and its solution to the expression problem which is protocols.

I was at first turned down by the JVM (not knowing any better back then), but it turns out being a hosted language is one of the best aspects of Clojure.

I'm hoping it's just the gateway drug. The JVM is a monster.

Monster? It's the best and fastest JIT that exists...

Faster than LuaJIT? ;)

A good monster like Godzilla, or a bad one like King Ghidorah? Either way, could you explain why you think so?

Probably not yet. Clojure's greatest selling point to management is still that you can just drop in a jar.

But Clojure has a strong opinion on immutability and functional programming. I'm not sure those Schemes do.

In any case, if you were to introduce a Scheme, I would do Racket for it's significant community within the larger Scheme ecosystem.

>Clojure has a strong opinion on immutability and functional programming. I'm not sure those Schemes do.

Scheme programmers emphasize the very same things.

>I would do Racket for it's significant community within the larger Scheme ecosystem.

Yeah, Racket would make sense, though I'm personally attached to Guile.

Between Guile, Chicken and other *nix Schemes which would you recommend for general scripting and admin task automaton? Which has a more expansive library ecosystem? I found that Clojure isn't the best fit for thEse tasks because of the start-up time and the JVM dependency.

Have you read http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/01/07/an-opinionated-guide... ? It might help you weigh your options and make a pick that best suits your preferences. I don't think you could go wrong with Guile or Chicken. I use Guile pretty much exclusively and it has a good POSIX API, so I write scripts in Scheme instead of Bash or Perl or whatever.

Racket has loads of libraries and I used it happily for a long time for automating everyday tasks (recently I switched to Python since we use it at work and I needed to learn it.)

disclaimer: no actual experience of this but...

the scheme shell maybe? scsh.net

here's some snippets:

http://scsh.net/contrib/wiki/CodeSnippets.html

Racket is wonderful.

There is a r7rs scheme (kawa) that runs interpreted on the jvm and can compile down to class files.

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