

Battle of the Lisps - gnosis
http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=729

======
mahmud
Lisp attracts hot-air punditry the same way Ruby attracts aerosol-based beauty
products.

~~~
spacemanaki
There wasn't much hot air after the title, I thought it was a pretty even
handed comparison.

~~~
benreesman
I found it superficial and bordering on mistaken.

------
_sh

      This problem [of software libraries] was definitely recognized by the Scheme community, and was “solved” in R6RS. However, R6RS seems to have been a flop...
    

I've heard this argument before (R6RS is a flop), but no-one can give me any
logical reason why this is the case. I wish Scheme implementors would stop
dragging their feet and implement R6RS already! Only with a portable library
mechanism (specified in R6RS) can Scheme users like myself begin the effort of
building a standard library platform for all Scheme implementations.

~~~
lanolin
> ... but no-one can give me any logical reason why this is the case.

If you search the c.l.s archives, you can find the various reasons.

> I wish Scheme implementors would stop dragging their feet and implement R6RS
> already!

My limited understanding of the situation is as follows:

R6RS made it through the standards process even though a substantial number of
implementors and practitioners weren't happy with it. Many refused to
implement R6RS, or else ignored it, but some big players did implement it.
After that, it was a stalemate for a while, with the community divided.

Then the current steering committee decided that this rift needed to be
repaired. I think they saw that some Schemers wanted to keep Scheme small,
while others wanted it to be more practical and include more "batteries". Read
more about their conclusions and plans at <http://www.scheme-reports.org/>
(strangely (or perhaps not so strangely?), I can't find a link to that site
from schemers.org)...

The long and the short of it is, to reunite the community, the steering
committee decided to define Scheme (R7RS) as a small core language ("wg1") + a
superset of features/libraries that most people are using in one way or
another anyway ("wg2"). If an implementor only wants to implement wg1, then
that's fine, and it's mostly like R5RS anyway. If they want to provide a full-
featured batteries-included implementation, then they implement wg1 + wg2
(which will take the best and least controversial features from R6RS and
probably also draw heavily from the SRFI's). This satisfies both the "keep it
small!" faction and the "we want more practical stuff included!" faction.

As we speak, the R7RS wg1 and wg2 groups are working out the kinks for their
respective proposals / public reports, with votes and discussions actively
taking place. I think R7RS is going to have broad support and be rapidly
adopted.

------
losvedir
Aw, why doesn't he mention Racket (formerly PLT Scheme)? I've been playing
around with it since I saw it on HN a few weeks ago and it's a nifty
implementation. DrRacket is a great environment, and it seems like it has good
library support - both lots of things available, and easy to drop in to your
code, with (require ...).

