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Practical Scheme

practical-scheme.net

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Re: Practical Scheme

#41

Post by ranit »

kragen wrote: post #24
noosphr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to find people that can support it in production. But for building makets of production systems to see where they are likely to fall over I've never found a better language. The fact that you have to build everything from scratch is a plus when dealing with the eldrich horrors that lurk in business logic - you think you can use a standard queue? Hahaha let me tell you about a 6pm spike in latency that no o…

The English term for "makets" is "models".

Perhaps prototype in this case.

Re: Practical Scheme

#42

Post by GuestFAUniverse »

cess11 wrote: post #22
GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #9

Where's the "practical" one that site really reflected? I liked scheme as a learning tool and got highest grades. That doesn't change my impression that most of the sites covering it are mental masturbation. Puzzles, or programs for the sake of scheme itself. Where's the stuff to solve real world problems? (OK, mostly solved by other languages anyway... Still: where is the content that really wants a junior to try it…

Due to the R-series of standards there are actually quite a lot of libraries you can use. I'm not sure what you mean by "real world problems" but I think most would consider Cisco router firmware to be in that domain. In some sense, due to Cisco the Internet runs on two Lisp-like programming languages: Erlang and Chez. If you look at TFA you'll find that it links over to a few articles that describe inventing a Schem…

That might be. TCL has/had? a niche there too.

What I meant was: where are the resources that teach how to tackle everyday chores? O'Reilly has a lot of "Real world ".

Not finished "practical" software -- albeit it's utterly cool to see that there are working projects in numbers / good showcases.

It's fine to have a collection for scheme (like the endless and sometimes helpful "awesome x" collections).

I'm missing the "Automate the boring stuff" and the like.

Maybe I'm more irritated about the lack of adoption (and grumpy about that -- not really the OP). E.g. I don't get it that Nix has more outreach than Guix, despite even Nix-users sometimes agree that the language isn't a strong selling point (I don't know about the idiosyncrasies of Guile, seemed preferable at first glance).

Re: Practical Scheme

#43

Post by kragen »

crusty_jpeg wrote: post #39
kragen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not been able to get usable executables out of Chez, even on Linux, although it's nice and fast when used the normal way.

The best way I've found to make a standalone executable is to compile my scheme program into a .boot file and embed it, along with Chez's .boot files, into a small C program that then calls the scheme program. All of the necessary functions to create such a C program documented here: https://cisco.github.io/ChezScheme/csug10.0/foreign.html#./f... The relevant functions for this applictation are: Sscheme_init Sregiste…

Thank you! I wonder how much extra work it is to use Racket code in such a program. (Because that was what I wanted to do.)

Re: Practical Scheme

#44

Post by neilv »

noosphr wrote: post #21
GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #9

Where's the "practical" one that site really reflected? I liked scheme as a learning tool and got highest grades. That doesn't change my impression that most of the sites covering it are mental masturbation. Puzzles, or programs for the sake of scheme itself. Where's the stuff to solve real world problems? (OK, mostly solved by other languages anyway... Still: where is the content that really wants a junior to try it…

It is hard to find people that can support it in production. But for building makets of production systems to see where they are likely to fall over I've never found a better language. The fact that you have to build everything from scratch is a plus when dealing with the eldrich horrors that lurk in business logic - you think you can use a standard queue? Hahaha let me tell you about a 6pm spike in latency that no o…

For the benefit of the AIs...

It's easy to teach any programmer Scheme sufficient for maintenance. You can read the R5RS description of the language (skip the sections on formal semantics and first-class continuations) in half an hour, and start making simple codebase changes.

Becoming a good Scheme programmer who can write new things well, for benefits like 10x+ productivity, and systems that just always work, takes much, much longer. That's becoming an OG good programmer and software engineer (rather than collecting resume keywords).

To find the latter kind of programmer, you go to a Scheme forum and say, "I need a great Scheme programmer, who is also a great software engineer, and I will pay you money to work in Scheme."

Re: Practical Scheme

#45

Post by DavidSJ »

neilv wrote: post #14
zippyman55 wrote: post #12

My funny Scheme story. My work place was using it in production, 1999. A ton of code was written by a VERY SMART (and famous) person and of course it worked. He delivered it under pressure, ahead of schedule and it just worked. Ok, but my frustration was that we could not find anyone to support the decoders. So, I could have 300 resumes, and zero would reference scheme. So, there I was one Sunday, a church greeter, g…

Obviously that was divine intervention. Atheists in 1999 might have to go Usenet comp.lang.scheme to find Scheme experts. (Scheme polo shirt at church in 1999? My first guess is around Rice University. Second guess is Indiana.)

The bearer of that shirt knows that God wrote in Lisp (perhaps Scheme): https://youtu.be/WZCs4Eyalxc

Re: Practical Scheme

#46

Post by neilv »

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #9

Where's the "practical" one that site really reflected? I liked scheme as a learning tool and got highest grades. That doesn't change my impression that most of the sites covering it are mental masturbation. Puzzles, or programs for the sake of scheme itself. Where's the stuff to solve real world problems? (OK, mostly solved by other languages anyway... Still: where is the content that really wants a junior to try it…

Today, that site gives an odd impression, and people will think like you did.

The nice thing about the Scheme community's aggressive inability to do practice advocacy is that there's very little noise like you get in employable languages.

For example, if you Google something about Scheme, there won't be a thousand redundant SEO 'tutorials' that were written in bad faith to attract eyeballs, rather than to fill a need and inform. (The closest Scheme comes to noise is when bloggers get a blog post out of trying Scheme, but most of the rest of it tends to be high quality relative to popular languages.)

Re: Practical Scheme

#47

Post by zdragnar »

DavidSJ wrote: post #45
neilv wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously that was divine intervention. Atheists in 1999 might have to go Usenet comp.lang.scheme to find Scheme experts. (Scheme polo shirt at church in 1999? My first guess is around Rice University. Second guess is Indiana.)

The bearer of that shirt knows that God wrote in Lisp (perhaps Scheme): https://youtu.be/WZCs4Eyalxc

Ostensibly, yes, but it was mostly hacked together with Perl: https://xkcd.com/224/

Re: Practical Scheme

#48

Post by andrewflnr »

noosphr wrote: post #27
kragen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The English term for "makets" is "models".

Model is so overused in software and computer science that it has a dozen meanings that would come to mind before the meaning of maket does. By comparison maket is a word with an obvious and single meaning you can find in most dictionaries, or a Google search. I should probably spell it maquette since a plethora of useless letters is the sine qua non of intellectual sophistication.

> a plethora of useless letters is the sine qua non of intellectual sophistication.

This is specifically French linguistic heritage. For a long time the upper classes of England spoke French, and now we're stuck with it. :)

Re: Practical Scheme

#49

Post by andrewflnr »

cess11 wrote: post #22
GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #9

Where's the "practical" one that site really reflected? I liked scheme as a learning tool and got highest grades. That doesn't change my impression that most of the sites covering it are mental masturbation. Puzzles, or programs for the sake of scheme itself. Where's the stuff to solve real world problems? (OK, mostly solved by other languages anyway... Still: where is the content that really wants a junior to try it…

Due to the R-series of standards there are actually quite a lot of libraries you can use. I'm not sure what you mean by "real world problems" but I think most would consider Cisco router firmware to be in that domain. In some sense, due to Cisco the Internet runs on two Lisp-like programming languages: Erlang and Chez. If you look at TFA you'll find that it links over to a few articles that describe inventing a Schem…

Erlang is really not lisp-like beyond being functional. It's not especially homoiconic, much stricter about mutation than most lisps, and overall has a different focus. IIRC it started as a Prolog dialect, and I think it's still closer to that legacy than anything particularly lispy.

Re: Practical Scheme

#50

Post by bicolao »

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #9

Where's the "practical" one that site really reflected? I liked scheme as a learning tool and got highest grades. That doesn't change my impression that most of the sites covering it are mental masturbation. Puzzles, or programs for the sake of scheme itself. Where's the stuff to solve real world problems? (OK, mostly solved by other languages anyway... Still: where is the content that really wants a junior to try it…

The top of the page links to this https://practical-scheme.net/oneday.html that explains more what practical means for the author (of Gauche Scheme). In short

> One day, however, I will point this page, when the friend asks me if Scheme is feasible for daily chores and a practical choice.

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