
Chicken Scheme looks mighty fine - gnosis
http://lenz.unl.edu/wordpress/?p=18
======
reynolds
I love Chicken Scheme. The community is awesome and tightly knit. They're
always looking to help out new users. I was new to the community awhile back
and got a ton of solid feedback on some work I was doing in Chicken. I
published epoll bindings for Chicken after figuring out how things were done
in their community.

Moritz from the Chicken community recently published a Mongrel2 egg as well
(<http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/mongrel2>)

~~~
cfdrake
As somebody looking to get into Scheme a bit, would you recommend Chicken as a
good starting point for practical usage?

As a newcomer, there are just so many implementations to choose from, even
when I restrict myself to choosing ones that can compile to C. Racket,
Chicken, Gambit, Bigloo. They all look good on paper, and all feel the same
(to me) when trying them out. What sets Chicken apart from the rest?

(FWIW, my research is leading me towards Chicken, but I've got that nagging
voice in my head wondering if it's the right choice)

~~~
klutometis
Chicken feels like a local optimum of pragmatism and flexibility to me; Racket
is larger, to be sure, but somehow overwhelming.

------
klutometis
I've been using Chicken for five years to fulfill contracts for military,
biotech and publishing clients.

While I set out at first to disprove the axiom that "Scheme is not
commercially viable;" Chicken is now my preferred method of writing
performant, robust and literate code.

~~~
snippyhollow
May you tell us more about it? (For things you can speak about.)

~~~
klutometis
I delivered a bizarre product for PSYOP [1] that involves crafting "lines of
persuasion" for target audiences; another that prescribes chemotherapy
regimens based on genetic profiles of tumors; and finally a wiki → docbook →
latex compiler for textbooks.

A few things that really came in handy: XML ↔ S-expression equivalence (for
writing functional XML parsers); code-data unification (for structurally
composing documents); arbitrary precision arithmetic; etc.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_(Unite...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_\(United_States\))

------
rsheridan6
This article is from 2007. The founder of the project, Felix, stepped down
some time ago, and I haven't been following it for the past few years. I'm not
sure who's in charge, or what's been happening. Does anybody know the status
of Chicken now?

~~~
reynolds
Felix is still working on Chicken. He's also active on the mailing list. There
are a number of people actively working on it as well.

------
makmanalp
Interestingly, the easyffi egg seems to be in "unsupported or redundant". Does
anyone know why?

[http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-projects/egg-
index-4.html#ob...](http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-projects/egg-
index-4.html#obsolete)

Also, for a nice intro, try "chicken for programmers of <x>":

[http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-for-programmers-of-other-
lan...](http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-for-programmers-of-other-languages)

~~~
klutometis
easyffi has been superseded by bind [1], apparently.

[1] <http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/bind>

