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The Little Typer (2018)

thelittletyper.com

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Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#11

Post by 4ad »

ducktective wrote: post #9

What modern scheme is best to use for these "the little x'er" book series? Some of them suggest their dialect (like learner suggests Racket I think), but what about others? In short, what scheme is the most practical and useful nowadays? Here is the result of my research so far, in order of preference according to the above requirements: Guile: most active community, GNU glue language, Guix Chicken: most pragmatic on…

I don't know what is the best Scheme implementation, but this book has little to do with Scheme though. Pie uses S-expressions for syntax, and happens to be implemented in Racket, but you don't interact with Racket directly.

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#12

Post by [deleted] »

ducktective wrote: post #9

What modern scheme is best to use for these "the little x'er" book series? Some of them suggest their dialect (like learner suggests Racket I think), but what about others? In short, what scheme is the most practical and useful nowadays? Here is the result of my research so far, in order of preference according to the above requirements: Guile: most active community, GNU glue language, Guix Chicken: most pragmatic on…

[deleted]

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#13

Post by [deleted] »

Jtsummers wrote: post #2

Three past discussions with discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18046745 - Sept 22, 2018 (132 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31465368 - May 22, 2022 (23 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33162971 - Oct 11, 2022 (96 comments)

[deleted]

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#14

Post by nextos »

ducktective wrote: post #9

What modern scheme is best to use for these "the little x'er" book series? Some of them suggest their dialect (like learner suggests Racket I think), but what about others? In short, what scheme is the most practical and useful nowadays? Here is the result of my research so far, in order of preference according to the above requirements: Guile: most active community, GNU glue language, Guix Chicken: most pragmatic on…

Guile is great, but I think outside Guix it's pretty niche.

Racket is probably the most frequent choice. But I really like some aspects of Chicken, Gambit and Bigloo.

Even Clojure or CL could also be used, with a bit of friction of course.

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#16

Post by nextos »

RedNifre wrote: post #8

Is there an online community for this where you can ask questions? E.g. a discord server or an IRC channel?

I don't think there's a centralized community for the Little Series. I think this is unfortunate. With a community, some great titles like The Little MLer (typed FP) and A Little Java, a Few Patterns (OOP) would be much better known.

I found those two outstanding. I think A Little Java has been reprinted. But last time I checked, The Little MLer was bloody expensive. Standard ML, OCaml and F# need a lot more exposure. They are simple and practical. The Little MLer does a great job introducing the basics.

To close the circle, the Little Series is missing a book about concurrent and distributed paradigms à la Erlang. They already have functional programming, typed functional programming, declarative programming, dependent types, theorem proving, object-oriented programming and machine learning.

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#17

Post by davexunit »

ducktective wrote: post #9

What modern scheme is best to use for these "the little x'er" book series? Some of them suggest their dialect (like learner suggests Racket I think), but what about others? In short, what scheme is the most practical and useful nowadays? Here is the result of my research so far, in order of preference according to the above requirements: Guile: most active community, GNU glue language, Guix Chicken: most pragmatic on…

Guile is my Scheme of choice.

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#18

Post by RedNifre »

soegaard wrote: post #15
RedNifre wrote: post #8

Is there an online community for this where you can ask questions? E.g. a discord server or an IRC channel?

You are welcome in the Racket Discord. https://discord.com/invite/racket-571040468092321801

Thank you! I joined, but don't see a place for Pie, so I just asked about it in the beginner channel instead.

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#19

Post by ProllyInfamous »

As a retired electrician attempting hobby-level "learn to code" (i.e. I don't know anything about modern programming and did not even understand anything from OP's link), this Amazon review helped me understand OP's link:

>..I’ve been (slowly) working my way through The Little Typer. It’s a deep dive on dependent types, starting with the very basics and building up a toy language one step at a time. I can feel it gradually changing how I think about programming (heck, how I think about thinking).

>..It’s really, really enjoyable. The format is very approachable, even fun. Rigorous and demanding, yet doesn’t take itself too seriously. Some lisp experience is helpful, but probably (maybe?) not necessary. But do yourself a favor and learn lisp anyway ;-)

Maybe some day I'll motivate myself to even figure out how to first install Racket/Pie (first, I have to figure out what even these are).

Thanks for the motivation/educational resource, OP.

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#20

Post by wk_end »

ducktective wrote: post #9

What modern scheme is best to use for these "the little x'er" book series? Some of them suggest their dialect (like learner suggests Racket I think), but what about others? In short, what scheme is the most practical and useful nowadays? Here is the result of my research so far, in order of preference according to the above requirements: Guile: most active community, GNU glue language, Guix Chicken: most pragmatic on…

A book like this doesn’t need to be “practical” and “useful” - I don’t think, say, the shortage of libraries for Chez Scheme is going to hamstring you in anyway.
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