

Google App Inventor uses Scheme under the hood - mark_h
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/under-hood-of-app-inventor-for-android.html

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jimbokun
Is that this Hal Abelson?

<http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/hal/hal.html>

I guess that would explain where they got the idea to use Scheme.

~~~
paulsmith
"Here's how I've been spending my time recently. * On sabbatical at Google for
calendar year 2009"

Yup.

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irrelative
It's a testament to how rarely Scheme (lisp, etc) are used when a story like
this makes it to the #1 on HN.

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patio11
I had a nutty professor in college. He hooked me on scripting languages -- his
favorite was gawk. He would write absolutely everything in gawk. Need a data
structure? Use an associative array, it is the Gawk Way. Need code reuse?
Cheaper to delete and start over. He was brilliant, I learned a lot from him,
and I would not let him near my code if my life depended on it.

Lisp has always struck me as a "nutty professor" sort of language. I hear it
is wonderful and pure and that if you truly grok it you see the Hand of God
Himself in its awesome majesty staring out from within your code. But while
Lisp seems to be long on awe, it seems to be short on software I'd actually
want to use.

No one has ever claimed to have had a religious experience from reading PHP
code (and if they did, I would suggest dousing them with holy water from a
safe distance). But PHP has Wordpress. "Lisp can do a blogging platform too!
Better! Stronger! Faster! We can do it, we have the technology!" Yes, Lisp
can... but Lisp doesn't. (And if it did, I have a disturbing premonition that
the steps to build a piece of blogging software would start with "#1: You need
a webserver. None of the existing ones are exactly right, but that is no
problem, since making a web server is easy in Lisp. First we define a few
simple macros...")

Now, if I were a Lisp developer POed at ignorant savages on the Internet
suggesting my language was perhaps a bit ivory-towery, I'd probably spend my
time writing software which was so good they'd be unable to ignore me.

~~~
bokchoi
I think I had the same nutty professor at Wash U.

~~~
w1ntermute
Was it this guy: <http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~loui/> ?

~~~
bokchoi
It sure was.

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naz
Every sufficiently complex program implements a Lisp engine in disguise.

~~~
jodrellblank
So the saying claims. Is the point that something would be better if it wasn't
disguised, or is it just a smug boast?

~~~
wmf
The point is that you can save time by just using Lisp rather than
reimplementing it. Which is what Google has done here.

BTW the original is <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule>

~~~
twopoint718
Or as Guile <http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html> suggests, if you're
going to add a scripting/extension language to a program, they have a way of
growing in size and complexity; just use guile.

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systems
They didn't use Scheme because it was complex, they used it because it was
simple.

~~~
jodrellblank
Maybe... that wasn't in the list of reasons given. What if they had Miguel de
Icaza and an existing C#/Mono -> android platform available?

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michaelneale
If you don't see:

>Posted by Bill Magnuson, _Hal Abelson_ , and Mark Friedman and >Scheme
expertise was readily available among our team

And smile and chuckle a bit, you need to stop what you are doing immediately,
and go read/watch/learn the SICP stuff from MIT - if for no other reason then
to learn some of history.

