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Chez Scheme is now free

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Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#141

Post by LeonidasXIV »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #22
brianobush wrote: post #7

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…

Amusingly Cadence Design Systems also uses Lisp from what I heard from people who worked there on a Lisp meetup.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#142

Post by fredmorcos »

clacke2 wrote: post #106
chubot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C is the foundation of computing in the sense that essentially every programming language and operating system is written in C or C++, and those are the tools that enable every other piece of software. More precisely, I would say that C is the foundation of software; it's how we stopped throwing out our programs when we changed computers. The first portable operating system kernels were written in C. I guess I could…

> To actually be bootstrapped, they had to add all this other stuff like vectors and hash tables. Just like C had to add things like arrays to the Turing machine? C doesn't even have hash tables in the spec! According to your definitions, C is a toy language.

> Just like C had to add things like arrays to the Turing machine?

Care to elaborate on that?

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#143

Post by groovy2shoes »

pjmlp wrote: post #139
TeMPOraL wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ignoring all the computing work done before C. C and UNIX were huge steps back in computing, that we're only slowly beginning to recover from.

There a sentence from a famous women in the history of computing, I don't recall which one, about C setting the progress of compiler optimizations back to the dawn of computing.

Perhaps it was Fran Allen. In Coders at Work, she has quite a few things to say on the topic:

--- Begin Quote ---

-Seibel-: When do you think was the last time that you programmed?

-Allen-: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization.

The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue. The motivation for the design of C was three problems they couldn't solve in the high-level languages: One of them was interrupt handling. Another was scheduling resources, taking over the machine and scheduling a process that was in the queue. And a third one was allocating memory. And you couldn't do that from a high-level language. So that was the excuse for C.

-Seibel-: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?

-Allen-: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve.

By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are... basically not taught much anymore in colleges and universities.

--- End Quote ---

(taken from pp. 501-502)

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#144

Post by pjmlp »

groovy2shoes wrote: post #143
pjmlp wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There a sentence from a famous women in the history of computing, I don't recall which one, about C setting the progress of compiler optimizations back to the dawn of computing.

Perhaps it was Fran Allen. In Coders at Work , she has quite a few things to say on the topic: --- Begin Quote --- -Seibel-: When do you think was the last time that you programmed? -Allen-: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C c…

Yep that one.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#145

Post by sklogic »

chubot wrote: post #116
clacke2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To actually be bootstrapped, they had to add all this other stuff like vectors and hash tables. Just like C had to add things like arrays to the Turing machine? C doesn't even have hash tables in the spec! According to your definitions, C is a toy language.

No, because it's possible to implement efficient hash tables with C's primitives -- in fact that's how hash tables in essentially ALL languages ARE implemented. cons cells are not sufficient to implement hash tables. Scheme needs arrays for that. cons cells can be implemented efficiently using arrays, but the converse isn't true, so arrays are more fundamental in some sense. If you don't care about algorithmic effici…

> in fact that's how hash tables in essentially ALL languages ARE implemented

Obviously a false statement.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#146

Post by sklogic »

piyush_soni wrote: post #96
dman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought scheme was like the beatles - people universally only had good things to say about it.

I newly joined this company, and they have 20 years old codebase which is mix of C and Scheme code. The only way they debug the massive Scheme part is using print statements. And I only have bad things to say about that. :( If there's a better way all of them have been missing, I'd love to hear that. I've learned that they have adapted the MIT Scheme implementation to add Object Oriented features, and it "kind of" wo…

> The only way they debug the massive Scheme part is using print statements.

Why would you need anything else for debugging?!?

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#147

Post by aalhour »

rohwer wrote: post #36

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

Thanks for referencing Dybvig's compiler course, can you point me to the course materials online, or share them with us here, if it's not an issue of copyrights of course?

I tried looking the course materials online but the Indiana University website gave me a 404 error page when I tried to access the course from Dybvig's website.

Thanks.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#148

Post by davexunit »

chubot wrote: post #116
clacke2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To actually be bootstrapped, they had to add all this other stuff like vectors and hash tables. Just like C had to add things like arrays to the Turing machine? C doesn't even have hash tables in the spec! According to your definitions, C is a toy language.

No, because it's possible to implement efficient hash tables with C's primitives -- in fact that's how hash tables in essentially ALL languages ARE implemented. cons cells are not sufficient to implement hash tables. Scheme needs arrays for that. cons cells can be implemented efficiently using arrays, but the converse isn't true, so arrays are more fundamental in some sense. If you don't care about algorithmic effici…

>cons cells are not sufficient to implement hash tables.

Again, cons cells are not the only primitive type for making compound data structures.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#149

Post by eggy »

pjmlp wrote: post #144
groovy2shoes wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it was Fran Allen. In Coders at Work , she has quite a few things to say on the topic: --- Begin Quote --- -Seibel-: When do you think was the last time that you programmed? -Allen-: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C c…

Yep that one.

Great quote. I had never read that one. The irony of language wars about the monolith that is C vs. the many higher-level languages that allow a human to code according to his mental abstractions and cognitive ability, rather than memorizing machine-specific, or os-specific facts that don't translate over to newer machine architectures. All this on HN, running on a Lisp, Arc, that once sat upon an academic scheme now called Racket.

I agree C is necessary for low-level programming, but for the meat of all the other applications and usages, higher-level languages are needed. I don't mind programming certain things in C, but I thoroughly enjoy the mental exercise when programming in the J programming language, Lisp, or Forth. Yes, Forth. C programmers can have the Earth; I would like to be coding with the fellas who design mission-critical software for satellites like Rosetta, and groups like NASA and the ESA, using Forth in Rosetta's case [1].

Slim Whitman sold more records than the Beatles, or so I think I heard that on a late-night TV commercial back in the 80s, but I never owned a record from him ;)

  [1]  http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2003ESASP.532E..72B

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#150

Post by davexunit »

wtbob wrote: post #129
Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Guile 2.0 branch. I don't know what magic optimisation dust they sprinkled over the upcoming 2.2, but it sure is fast. We thought about using chicken, but it depends quite a lot on using syntax-case to deconstruct everything, and I didn't want to learn their implicit renaming stuff. Apparently the 2.2 branch has full elisp support. Can't wait for Emacs to run on it.

> Apparently the [guile] 2.2 branch has full elisp support. Can't wait for Emacs to run on it. I really wish folks would spend the time they spent porting elisp to guile Scheme porting elisp to Lisp instead. Scheme's great for what it is (really), but what it is not is an industrial-strength systems programming language. Common Lisp is.

>porting elisp to guile Scheme

This is a common misunderstanding. Emacs Lisp is not being rewritten as Scheme. What is actually happening is that there is a compiler for Emacs Lisp that runs on Guile's virtual machine. Elisp isn't going anywhere.

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