Perchance to Scheme (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#31

Post by baldfat » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 1:14 PM UTC

Racket is not academic to me. Racket equals programming fun and really is a joy to use. Academic seems to not convey the feeling one gets when using Racket. To me Racket is really the future of what languages will look like, a language to create your own DSL.

The greatest strength of Racket is its documentation. Secondly the way Racket actually teaches you how to be a better programmer. I personally grew the most due to "How to Design Programs" https://htdp.org/2018-01-06/Book/ Third the executables for cross platform is its reason why I use Racket at work. I can make it and create an executable with raco.

I feel like Racket is the most general purpose language I have ever used. I grew up on C64 Assembly, Pascal and Forth. When I learned Python I felt like I could do anything. That was until I wanted my Python code to be used on a computer that wasn't my own computer.

Python was my go to language for everything at work but I ended up moving to R about 6 years ago. I felt my R was rough around the edges and picked up Racket to learn about R's Scheme roots. It was a night and day difference. I have several pet programs that saves me hours every week.

My Racket programs are much more readible than my Python Scripts. The libraries are certainly not all there but it is actually easy and fun to create your own implementations in Racket and a library for your own use.

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#32

Post by bjoli » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 1:36 PM UTC

As a guile user myself, I feel I must say that guile works just fine also when you are not embedding it. It is a very capable scheme, and even though it is not as fast as chez or racket, things have gotten a lot better (the upcoming JIT in the 3.0 release means at least a 2x speedup).

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#33

Post by eatonphil » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

drmeister wrote: post #30

Alternatively - you can choose to program in Common Lisp - an industrial strength language that has been demonstrated in large projects like the QPX flight search engine (Google Flights). For anyone who doesn't know - a big difference that Common Lisp brings to the table is that it has separate namespaces for variables and functions. This may not sound like much but it makes it much easier to write macros (code that…

Hadn't heard of ITA (authors of QPX before being bought by Google) before. Now that I'm looking, it isn't clear to me QPX is still written in Common Lisp? Has anyone confirmed recently that it is still a big CL project?

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#34

Post by eatonphil » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 1:49 PM UTC

plinkplonk wrote: post #15

erjiang wrote: post #12

I am guilty of writing my own Scheme (R5RS) interpreter as well, and a key takeaway from the experience was that many things calling themselves Scheme interpreters are missing core parts of Scheme. Implementing a language that resembles Scheme is quite easy. Implementing call-with-current-continuation and hygienic macros AND getting the tricky little details correct is not.[0] An analogy might be someone offering "ab…

"Implementing a language that resembles Scheme is quite easy. Implementing call-with-current-continuation and hygienic macros AND getting the tricky little details correct is not." (tangential) and this is where most "build your own compiler" style books fall down. They teach you to implement ultra simple languages, but don't tackle memory management/garbage collection, concurrency, production grade typecheckers, and…

You will love Lisp in Small Pieces [0] then. :) It covers various lisps (mostly Scheme and Common Lisp) including how continuations can be implemented.

Hygienic macros are not hard to implement [1]. I can't speak to the efficiency of my implementation though.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1168500.LISP_in_Small_Pi...

[1] https://github.com/eatonphil/bsdscheme/blob/master/examples/...

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#35

Post by drmeister » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 1:49 PM UTC

eatonphil wrote: post #33

drmeister wrote: post #30

Alternatively - you can choose to program in Common Lisp - an industrial strength language that has been demonstrated in large projects like the QPX flight search engine (Google Flights). For anyone who doesn't know - a big difference that Common Lisp brings to the table is that it has separate namespaces for variables and functions. This may not sound like much but it makes it much easier to write macros (code that…

Hadn't heard of ITA (authors of QPX before being bought by Google) before. Now that I'm looking, it isn't clear to me QPX is still written in Common Lisp? Has anyone confirmed recently that it is still a big CL project?

I hired/partnered with one of their former engineers. QPX is most certainly still written in Common Lisp.

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#36

Post by eatonphil » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

drmeister wrote: post #35

eatonphil wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hadn't heard of ITA (authors of QPX before being bought by Google) before. Now that I'm looking, it isn't clear to me QPX is still written in Common Lisp? Has anyone confirmed recently that it is still a big CL project?

I hired/partnered with one of their former engineers. QPX is most certainly still written in Common Lisp.

Thanks for the confirmation!

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#37

Post by jacobush » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

What about PicoLisp?!

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#38

Post by lispm » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 2:28 PM UTC

eatonphil wrote: post #36

drmeister wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hired/partnered with one of their former engineers. QPX is most certainly still written in Common Lisp.

Thanks for the confirmation!

They also published some code: https://common-lisp.net/project/qitab/

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#39

Post by all2 » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

canuseeme wrote: post #21

> Clojurescript.... Personally, I don’t like it on a matter of principle: I don’t like things that compile to JavaScript. It doesn’t seem like anything you really need to write better code. Maybe I don't understand what the alternative is when you want to write client side code for the browser - js?? I use Clojurescript and find clear benefits. By way of example I often found the general setTimeout functionality to b…

What was your experience with Racket?

Re: Perchance to Scheme (2016)

#40

Post by ballpark » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 2:49 PM UTC

kkylin wrote: post #9

nerdponx wrote: post #5

I know this is a big controversial can of worms, but as a filthy casual who just happens to like Lisp, the idea of R6RS is pretty appealing to me. This post seems very much R5RS-oriented. Are there any R6RS-conformant Schemes that are recommended?

Not a R6RS fan myself, so no definitive answer. But AFAIK Chez (now open source as someone else posted) is R6RS-compliant and one of the fastest implementations. Also, R7RS-small is final I think. Not sure about R7RS-large. Here's an old discsussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11700167 .

I think Chicken Scheme recently became r7rs in their new version 5