What Would be a Good Lisp Project?

[lambdaman]

I've been going through SICP and I'm currently on chapter 4. I was wondering if there are any projects (open source) or new ideas that could keep me busy for 3-4 months?

I'm also contemplating if I should learn another lisp like Clojure since it seems that it's a bit impractical to build something big with Scheme alone.

[zephyrfalcon]

There are several Scheme implementations that are well suited to building "something big". Someone mentioned Racket, but there's also e.g. Chicken Scheme or Gauche, both of which come with a sizable collection of libraries to do real-world stuff. Then there are implementations like Scheme48, which seem to be tailored to building something "on top" of it.

[CyberFonic]

Considering that the lack of a well implemented GUI is holding back broader adoption of Scheme, how about a windowing solution that leverages ubiquitous browser technology. You might want to take a look at Lively Kernel for some ideas. But since then, HTML5 support for Canvas in both 2D and 3D has greatly improved so might be better option than SVG.

[gruseom → CyberFonic]

When used as advertised, SVG is slow. But there's a way to use it that's actually much faster than Canvas for some purposes: batch up everything you want to render into a single blob of SVG text and then splat it on to the screen in one go using innerHTML. This is faster than drawing the same thing with a series of Canvas API calls and far faster than making incremental modifications to the SVG DOM.

[pdelgallego]

The best lisp project is a lisp interpreter/compiler in Lisp.

Take a look to Lisp in Small Pieces[1] if you are interested in something beyond the metacircular evaluator from SICP.

Read the code of Racket, you will learn a lot from it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Lisp-Small-Pieces-Christian-Queinnec/d...

[IvarTJ]

I personally dream of making a web community application with Scheme in which users can program bulletin items. Inspired by LambdaMOO, but with a focus on typical web facilities such as threaded discussion and wiki articles.

[melling]

People are using Racket Scheme.

http://racket-lang.org/

Build a website. Instant gratification and you can always grow it into something big.

[stray]

A lisp version of matplotlib wouldn't suck...