
Yegge Strikes Back from the Grave - fogus
http://langnostic.blogspot.com/2010/09/yegge-strikes-back-from-grave.html
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thomas11
Whether Common Lisp or Racket comes out in front in a comparison, it always
strikes me as amazing what the Racket people get done given their manpower. I
don't know how large the team exactly is, and how many external contributors
they have. But looking at their site, they have everything from a modern
Scheme with libraries, a web server, modern packaging, experimental sub-
languages, a module contract system, and so on. And that's besides doing their
academic work.

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onefortwo
This post is not about Yegge. It's a little comparison of Common Lisp and
Scheme (Plt Racket). I think a post with such a bad title should not be read
no matter its content but YMMV.

This is all it contains about Steve Yegge: The quote from Yegge goes something
like "Most newcomers independently come to the same conclusion; Scheme is the
better language, but Common Lisp is the right choice for production work."
Bottom line, I remember disagreeing a long time ago, but I've uh...
independently come to the same conclusion.

~~~
Inaimathi
A while ago I noticed that I was suddenly doing more coding in SBCL than PLT
Scheme. When I thought about it, I realized that Steve Yegge said the same
thing a long time ago and I remember reacting with dismissal. The post wasn't
about Yegge, it was about the idea (which I've heard elsewhere too, he just
happened to be the one I remembered at the time) that Scheme is the "better
language" while being paradoxically less "useful" than Common Lisp.

In defense of the lame title, I tend to write in order to get things out of my
head. Had I known that someone would post that article on Reddit and Hacker
News, leading to Jay McCarthy dropping by and asking what, specifically, was
wrong with his server, I might have proofread it more than 0 times before
posting it anywhere.

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SwellJoe
When did Yegge die?

~~~
presidentender
He got married; much later, he stopped blogging.

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etal
I'm deeply curious where Clojure would fall in this comparison. Is Compojure
as suave as Hunchentoot? Is string formatting just as flexible? In practice,
is it a pain to have to fail over to Java library documentation when Clojure
doesn't suffice, versus having plentiful but scattered docs for a single
language?

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felideon
_It also always returns its result, and doesn't have the option of printing to
standard-out (you have to use printf for that)_

(format t "hello world")

From PCL: "T is shorthand for the stream _STANDARD-OUTPUT_ , while NIL causes
FORMAT to generate its output to a string, which it then returns."

~~~
_delirium
He was complaining that the _format_ in Scheme (and in PLT Racket) doesn't
have that CL feature.

~~~
Inaimathi
That's exactly what I meant. The CL version has options, the Scheme version
just takes a format string (which has fewer possible directives than its CL
counterpart), which makes it less flexible and slightly more verbose.

To be fair, it's not exactly a straightforward paragraph, and I was talking
about two different functions both named "format", so I can see how it might
have been confusing.

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jpr
I almost can't believe the #3, restarting a webserver for minor changes? That
reeks of static, batch-language oriented solution. Not that there's
necessarily anything wrong with static batch-languages, but I wouldn't have
thought Scheme is one.

~~~
Inaimathi
The other points about the web server (which Jay ended up focusing on more)
are really side issues; my biggest gripe was that lack of iteration during the
development phase. If I could change code on the fly, I'd be a happy camper.

