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Practical Scheme

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Re: Practical Scheme

#51

Post by kragen »

andrewflnr wrote: post #48
noosphr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

They spoke Old French, which had a decent phonetic orthography. Due to a series of successful spelling reforms, even modern French orthography is almost phonetic, with a few exceptions like Duras and fils, but the rules are complicated. English, by contrast, is halfway to hanxi — it's full of etymological spellings for most words, false-etymological spellings for a few, and a general spelling system that primarily reflects the pronunciations before the Great Vowel Shift. We can't blame this on the Franks.

Re: Practical Scheme

#52

Post by neilv »

imglorp wrote: post #36
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.)

Yale possibly. https://paulgraham.com/thist.html And of course MIT. https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/archival_object...

Scheme was a lot of places in 1999, so I started guessing about concentrations where someone might have had polo shirt schwag made up (e.g., Felleisen's PLT group at Rice, https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~robby/logos/ ) and a lot of churchgoing people (Texas, Indiana, and maybe later BYU/Utah).

I was at MIT in 1999, and class T-shirts occasionally happened, and there were tens of churches within walking distance, for historic reasons, but not a lot of churchgoing people from the universities themselves, that I'm aware of.

But who knows: toplevel works in strange and mysterious ways.

> 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.

Actually, except for the "famous" part, that sounds a bit like a major system in Scheme for which I was hired by a very smart person who'd done 10x or 100x development on it. And it just worked, and we could evolve it rapidly, and keep it just working. In 1999, it probably would have been based in New Jersey.

Re: Practical Scheme

#53

Post by andrewflnr »

kragen wrote: post #51
andrewflnr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. :)

They spoke Old French, which had a decent phonetic orthography. Due to a series of successful spelling reforms, even modern French orthography is almost phonetic, with a few exceptions like Duras and fils , but the rules are complicated. English, by contrast, is halfway to hanxi — it's full of etymological spellings for most words, false-etymological spellings for a few, and a general spelling system that primarily r…

Oh, I can easily believe the spelling made sense at the time. I'm not necessarily blaming the Franks so much as the English for hanging on to it. But you can't deny that words like "maquette" have French origin. (TBH I'm only taking it for granted that it has any real usage in English, but certainly words like it tend to be French. "-quette" is a dead giveaway.)

Re: Practical Scheme

#54

Post by kragen »

andrewflnr wrote: post #53
kragen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They spoke Old French, which had a decent phonetic orthography. Due to a series of successful spelling reforms, even modern French orthography is almost phonetic, with a few exceptions like Duras and fils , but the rules are complicated. English, by contrast, is halfway to hanxi — it's full of etymological spellings for most words, false-etymological spellings for a few, and a general spelling system that primarily r…

Oh, I can easily believe the spelling made sense at the time. I'm not necessarily blaming the Franks so much as the English for hanging on to it. But you can't deny that words like "maquette" have French origin. (TBH I'm only taking it for granted that it has any real usage in English, but certainly words like it tend to be French. "-quette" is a dead giveaway.)

Yes, definitely. I've never heard anyone use it in English, but people use it in Spanish all the time.

Re: Practical Scheme

#55

Post by cess11 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #49
cess11 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I invite people to try it out and then get back to us and tell us who is more right.

Re: Practical Scheme

#56

Post by andrewflnr »

cess11 wrote: post #55
andrewflnr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I invite people to try it out and then get back to us and tell us who is more right.

I have written both Erlang and Scheme (and even more Elixir). Have you? They're quite distinct.

I'm genuinely confused why you would be convinced about this. What are the points of similarity that aren't common to all functional languages?

Re: Practical Scheme

#57

Post by lucas_membrane »

cess11 wrote: post #6
whateveracct wrote: post #3

ctrl+F "chez" 0 results why? it's so good

It's represented where appropriate, e.g. here: https://practical-scheme.net/wiliki/schemexref.cgi?ChezSchem...

Seeing all those SRFI's listed, etc, on that page (63 of them), is astounding. How long would I have to work with scheme to get to comprehend what each represents without looking them up Captain Wimby's Bird Atlas of Nomenclature? What percentage of the people who take the time to read that page, for example, if they are trying to learn if Chez Scheme might fit their needs for a language implementation, are going to get a good idea about anything by scrutinizing that list? Isn't that like a bookstore filling its advertising with a list of ISBNs? I have tried to do some stuff with scheme at times in years past, and when I saw such lists galore with no plain-language information attached while trying figure out which tool to grab, it gave me some idea that the scheme community was a somewhat isolated ethnocentric culture of its own.

Re: Practical Scheme

#58

Post by Borkdude »

precompute wrote: post #32
valorzard wrote: post #2

What scheme do I used if I want to compile to a standalone executable on both Linux and windows? (That’s not Racket)

It can't make a standalone executable, but Babashka might be useful.

You kinda can:

https://github.com/babashka/babashka/wiki/Self-contained-exe...

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