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Chez Scheme is now free

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Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#51

Post by mwfunk »

dman wrote: post #41
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

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

If it's being used as a teaching language, it depends on the students. Some students will rail against the idea of learning a tool, any tool, that they don't think they would use professionally, even if the purpose of using the tool is to give them a different perspective on programming.

Also, some people just really hate the parentheses (not me).

Also, some people really hate the Beatles (not me). More so in the '60s as contemporary artists, less so now when they're more likely to be referred to in a historical context. But still. The White Album had no shortage of devastating reviews when it came out.

I'd imagine Scheme as a teaching language would be less controversial in schools where the CS students are more likely to already know some programming when they start, and/or don't have as much of a trade school mentality.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#52

Post by brudgers »

jordigh wrote: post #40
brudgers wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US universities have entire departments devoted to technology licensing. The default to secrecy may be an artifact of their historic reliance on defense agency funding for technical projects and the bureaucratic staffing for paperwork heavy processes. On the other hand, there's an intellectual idea that for many companies, existing software should perhaps be seen as a liability in double entry accounting due to it's…

Can you explain that a bit more? How does a company offload costs by freeing their software? Surely they're not expecting to rely on public contributions to reduce maintenance costs, are they?

Even at its most basic, an arbitrary developer filing a bug report is potentially less costly to handle than a customer experiencing a failure...it can be ignored and maybe the developer submits a patch.

On a longer timeline, hiring developers experienced in the technology from the open source community saves on the cost of training them for a proprietary code base.

Ideally, the open source community develops new features, identifies and patchs bugs, writes tests and libraries, etc. adding value realized by the company's paying customers. In the meantime the company still can devote staff to its business priorities and ignore those of the larger community: e.g. no `map` in go-lang and no `react new myapp` at the CLI for React.

To put it another way, why would a business open source code for anything other than business reasons?

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#54

Post by lispm »

Cisco prices from 2013

    SP-SW-LMIX0CH0 SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Wind,  Per Unit  $65.00
    SP-SW-LMIX0CHL SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Linux, Per 10    $325.00
    SP-SW-LMIX0CHW SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Wwind, Per 10    $325.00
    SP-SW-LMIX0CH1 SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Apple Mac,Per 10 $325.00
    SP-SW-LMIX0CHA SP BASE Chez Scheme Developm $65.00
    SP-SW-LMX01CHL SP BASE Chez Scheme Developm $65.00

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#55

Post by dmm »

TuringTest wrote: post #34
jordigh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you quote free software but not opensource? I am curious to know what the difference in your writing intended to convey.

That may be because "free software" is still an ambiguous term, while open source is relatively unambiguous. I prefer to use Free Software as my disambiguator of choice, but I understand the GP using the other form, and occasionally use it myself.

> while open source is relatively unambiguous

In my experience both terms are ambiguous. Many people seem to believe that "open source" simply means the source is available for examination. For example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3205771

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#56

Post by krat0sprakhar »

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 this! I worked on implementing a type-inference algorithm last week and I wish I had stumbled upon the chapter on unification[1] earlier.

[0] - https://github.com/prakhar1989/type-inference

[1] - http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/examples.html#./examples:h10

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#57

Post by hga »

chubot wrote: post #50
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 might not be getting a reference here, but FWIW, I had a recent experience with Scheme that was interesting. I did SICP nearly 19 years ago as a freshman, in 1997. And then a few months ago, I ported the metacircular-evaluator -- the "crown" of the course -- to femtolisp (the Lisp implementation underlying Julia). My thoughts were: 1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct…

WRT 3, assoc lists are just the simplest thing to store things like environments, they're traditional for "writing a Lisp in one week". If you modulerize your code, you can trivially use hash tables or whatever later. Ditto using lists for structures.

4: As I understand it, there are many macro systems available for Scheme. It's one of the languages in which "hygienic" macros has been explored, etc. So if you don't like the femtolisp bundled version, there might be another out there more to your taste.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#58

Post by davexunit »

chubot wrote: post #50
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 might not be getting a reference here, but FWIW, I had a recent experience with Scheme that was interesting. I did SICP nearly 19 years ago as a freshman, in 1997. And then a few months ago, I ported the metacircular-evaluator -- the "crown" of the course -- to femtolisp (the Lisp implementation underlying Julia). My thoughts were: 1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct…

>1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct), (caddr)

Every Scheme implementation I know of supports record types aka SRFI-9[0]. No one actually makes new data types from cons cells.

>2) Scheme code is very imperative!

Scheme supports many programming paradigms. Imperative programming is one. Functional programming, object-oriented programming, and relational programming are others. Not all Scheme code is imperative.

>3) It is awkward to represent environments with assoc lists.

Every Scheme implementation I know of has traditional mutable hash tables. Sometimes you want a hash table, sometimes you want an alist. It depends.

>4) Macros also seem to have a needlessly different syntax than regular functions.

I don't really understand this point. Are you talking about syntax-rules? If so, then I must disagree. syntax-rules is a very elegant language for defining hygienic macros.

SICP does not teach you everything that Scheme has to offer, and the Scheme implementations of the 1980s are a lot different than the Scheme implementations of 2016.

[0] http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-9/srfi-9.html

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#59

Post by grok2 »

brianobush wrote: post #7
xenophonf wrote: post #3

It's about time! Although I'm curious---how did Cisco end up owning it?

If you look at scheme.com, you will see Copyright © 2011 Cadence Research Systems. Cisco bought Cadence back in 2012.

AFAIK, Cisco never bought Cadence -- Cadence is an independent company -- maybe they bought some division or subsidiary of Cadence?

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#60

Post by bachmeier »

TuringTest wrote: post #34
jordigh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you quote free software but not opensource? I am curious to know what the difference in your writing intended to convey.

That may be because "free software" is still an ambiguous term, while open source is relatively unambiguous. I prefer to use Free Software as my disambiguator of choice, but I understand the GP using the other form, and occasionally use it myself.

Both are ambiguous, as explained here: https://opensource.org/faq#free-software

If you want to make an unambiguous statement, use "OSI approved license".

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