

The whole world should be using Scheme - Ixiaus

Just a silly post, nothing very stimulating. I have spent the last month and a half learning Clozure Common Lisp.<p>A cool implementation to be sure (it has an amazing wealth of integration with Obj-C on the Mac which is my platform). But, holy god Common Lisp is messy! SLIME? Why? I just want the interpreter running in a buffer along side the file I am editing! No need for all of the crazy connection routines.<p>Scheme is slim, and so much more intuitive! QUACK + mzscheme is a breeze to get running in Emacs, loads quicker, and feels cleaner...<p>&#60;/random_thoughts&#62;
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jacquesm
That's a pretty broad claim!

The number of LISP dialects and derivatives is pretty impressive, someone
ought to make a table that compares them side-by-side so you can select the
one that is right for what you want to do.

How broadly applicable is the QUACK + mzscheme combination ?

Would you be able to write a web application in it that serves up dynamic
content to a large number of users (a la HN, or larger, and without peeking at
the arc sources ;) ) ?

Would you be able to make it run on an embedded platform ?

Use it as a scripting language from the command line to access a database or a
filesystem and do a bunch of stuff ?

These are all common and everyday activities and I'm wondering how difficult
it would be to put scheme to work on problems like that.

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Ixiaus
True, I was having an emotional moment after getting QUACK + mzscheme setup.

As far as I know, the QUACK + mzscheme combo should work wherever you can have
a running instance of Emacs and mzscheme. It seems to do the job pretty well.
Running mzscheme with the errortrace argument and a few modifiers returns a
full debug backtrace for errors...

Worth while questions though. I do, however, find the cleanliness of a
programming language an attractor/deterrent to my learning it. Common Lisp is
pretty crufty.

I imagine Scheme is certainly better suited to running as an embedded than CL.

Either way, learning the language first is my concern for educational reasons;
making it useful is my secondary concern.

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jacquesm
> learning the language first is my concern for educational reasons; making it
> useful is my secondary concern.

I'm in the opposite boat, I have to somehow make my time earn me a living,
it's hard to justify time out for pure educational reasons (even if I do
smuggle a bit here and there).

Great to see you happy about learning a new language though, you can never
have enough of those under your belt.

Especially when they're off the beaten path.

~~~
Ixiaus
Yeah, I have no debt and no dependencies so I left my job to pursue self
education and personal projects.

Thanks for the vote of confidence :)

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teeja
There'll never be a language that "the whole world should be using." What's
optimal for one problem WILL be a poor choice for another problem.

Not to mention wide variations in the capabilities of programmers.

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david
Slime is one of the things I miss most when writing scheme.

