41–50 of 185 posts
Dybvig's compiler course was exemplary. Say what you may about Scheme, you learned so much more in those classes. His Scheme Programming Language book is highly recommended. Especially check out his extended examples chapter: http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/examples.html#./examples:h0
I used Chez Scheme for many years and loved its lightning fast compile times. For example, I'm not aware of any other full-scale compiler that can compile itself as fast as Chez can.
OberonSystem can build the whole compiler, OS, and applications in around 3 seconds.
I'm not usually given to short, low-content comments here on HN, but:
wow!
What is the library ecosystem like? This is ultimately what limits all other Scheme implementations.
Dybvig's compiler course was exemplary. Say what you may about Scheme, you learned so much more in those classes. His Scheme Programming Language book is highly recommended. Especially check out his extended examples chapter: http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/examples.html#./examples:h0
I used Chez Scheme for many years and loved its lightning fast compile times. For example, I'm not aware of any other full-scale compiler that can compile itself as fast as Chez can.
OberonSystem can build the whole compiler, OS, and applications in around 3 seconds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at scheme.com, you will see Copyright © 2011 Cadence Research Systems. Cisco bought Cadence back in 2012.
(Cadence for those who don't know are basically the equivalent of SolidWorks for anything in EE. They are the only company ( maybe Synopsis or Mentor, but I think there are a few holes here and there) on the planet that lets you go from designing something as simple and low level as an analog jellybean op-amp (with state of the art EM and S-param simulation) and verification, to RTL design (full power simulation and…
Dybvig's compiler course was exemplary. Say what you may about Scheme, you learned so much more in those classes. His Scheme Programming Language book is highly recommended. Especially check out his extended examples chapter: http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/examples.html#./examples:h0
I thought scheme was like the beatles - people universally only had good things to say about it.
I did SICP nearly 19 years ago as a freshman, in 1997. And then a few months ago, I ported the metacircular-evaluator -- the "crown" of the course -- to femtolisp (the Lisp implementation underlying Julia).
My thoughts were:
1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct), (caddr), ... Yes this is nice to show that car and cdr are all you need as axiomatic primitives, but for practical purposes it's annoying. You end up with lots of little functions with long names.
2) Scheme code is very imperative! Even the metacircular evaluator uses set-cdr! and so forth. I don't like imperative code with the Lisp syntax.
3) It is awkward to represent environments with assoc lists. I feel that having a language which is really bootstrapped requires some kind of hash table/dictionary. Because you need that to implement scopes with O(1) access rather than O(n). I believe there are experimental lisps that try to fix this.
4) Macros also seem to have a needlessly different syntax than regular functions. There are Lisps with f-exprs rather than s-exprs that try to fix this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fexpr
I was surprised by #3 and #4 -- it some sense Scheme is less "meta" and foundational than it could be. #2 is also a fundamental issue... at least if you want to call it the "foundation" of computing and build Lisp machines; I think this is evidence that this idea is a fundamentally flawed. #1 just makes it pale into languages like Python or even JavaScript.