Before you start learning Lisp...

Post by mgreenbe » Thu, Sep 10, 2009, 2:29 PM UTC

garnet7 wrote: post #30

I'm interested in learning Scheme, and keeping my fingers crossed that they can come together and specify some kind of "batteries-included" standard library. Otherwise, I'm afraid I'll only be able to fiddle with Scheme for an hour or two on weekends and get my real work done with one of the "popular" languages (i.e., Perl, Python, etc.). Yes, I realize PLT has some batteries included but I'd prefer a community stand…

Your fingers are going to be crossed for a long time. I think the Steering Committee has too many divergent interests on it for there ever to be agreement on a serious standard library. Schemers are very DIY; for example, see http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware.... Rolling your own libraries on top of a tiny implementation is not particularly uncommon. (I just hope you can write more, uh, ethical software than that guy!)

PLT has the most batteries of any distro I've ever seen (disclaimer: one of its authors was my undergrad advisor). That is, PLT is (a) free, (b) mature, and (c) has a fair number of modules written by people other than the developers of the language.

There's no sense in waiting, just dive in. If you don't want to use PLT, Bigloo can call Java libraries---solving your battery problem in a different way.

Post by garnet7 » Thu, Sep 10, 2009, 6:58 PM UTC

mgreenbe wrote: post #31

garnet7 wrote: post #30

I'm interested in learning Scheme, and keeping my fingers crossed that they can come together and specify some kind of "batteries-included" standard library. Otherwise, I'm afraid I'll only be able to fiddle with Scheme for an hour or two on weekends and get my real work done with one of the "popular" languages (i.e., Perl, Python, etc.). Yes, I realize PLT has some batteries included but I'd prefer a community stand…

Your fingers are going to be crossed for a long time. I think the Steering Committee has too many divergent interests on it for there ever to be agreement on a serious standard library. Schemers are very DIY; for example, see http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware... . Rolling your own libraries on top of a tiny implementation is not particularly uncommon. (I just hope you can write more, uh, et…

> Your fingers are going to be crossed for a long time.

Hm. That's going to make it very difficult to type.

> I think the Steering Committee has too many divergent interests on it for there ever to be agreement on a serious standard library.

That would be most unfortunate.

> Schemers are very DIY; for example, see [snip]

Not sure what about that story points to Schemers being particularly DIY. Sounds like the fellow needed something tiny, so rather than take a full-blown batteries-included language and strip out what he didn't need, he instead just used something small that he was familiar with.

> There's no sense in waiting, just dive in.

Yeah. Trying to make the time... thanks for the encouragement. :)

Re: Before you start learning Lisp...

Re: Before you start learning Lisp...