Scheme Is Love

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163729.aspx

by apotheon • 17 years ago

72 21 17 years ago

msdn.microsoft.com

dkarl• 17 years ago

An utterly commonplace article in itself, but to see this written by Don Box is surreal.

apotheon2• 17 years ago

That was pretty much my reaction.

profquail3• 17 years ago

I'd never heard of him before, so I looked him up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Box

I did like the article though, even though there wasn't much to it. One of these days when I have some time, I'm going to write a LISP/Scheme compiler for .NET/CLR...my goal is to get Arc running on .NET, specifically for IIS7 since it has better support for MVC applications.

vl• 17 years ago

There is a Scheme implementation called IronScheme that runs on .Net: http://www.codeplex.com/IronScheme

olavk3• 17 years ago

I don't think it is possible to implement continuations on top of the CLR.

mr_luc3• 17 years ago

There was also a port of an interpreted scheme written in Java that someone brought to C# -- I think it was floating around as ".NET Lisp" or "Lisp.NET"; NOT the 'example' Lisp 1 that someone wrote in the earliest days of the CLR, but a straight port of the Java project.

I used it myself once; snuck it into a project to run an admin interface for one of those crappy CRM's you're always being asked to make as a Code Monkey (it was just a little embedded language and user-interface element that let admins drag-and-drop "listers" and filters for various types of data, embedding them at will within the articles that they wrote -- I couldn't have imagined trying to write something like that for ASP.NET, so I lisped it, and I believe it's still humming along, for years now: a homebrew DSL parsed and executed by a pre-alpha interpreted lisp sitting at the heart of a .NET 1.1 application. Never a hiccup, and being admin-only, performance wasn't a concern; the end-result was compiled to a canonical XML format, which most .Net coders have no problem writing XSL for).

The project was being maintained on SourceForge by a really bright guy (from Australia afair); he'd added Arc-style lets and a nice little parser (for evaluating quoted infix expressions)

I remember trying to look it up a couple of years ago, to forward it to a friend still stuck in .netland, but it had disappeared; maybe someone here knows more.

endtime• 17 years ago

More on Don: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/de/Box/default.mspx

FWIW, being a Distinguished Engineer is a big deal. The guy running my team is a DE and he's probably the brightest person I've met at Microsoft...I consider myself fortunate to work for him. I've met people who've been full time (I'm an intern) for a few years and never met a DE.

joechung• 17 years ago

I love Scheme.

I ported Peter Norvig's JScheme to C#. I also ported JScheme to Python and Ruby to learn the basics of programming in those languages.

I wish Rich Hickey had kept working on the C# version of Clojure.

I would love to check out your port of Arc to .NET once it's ready.

gruseom• 17 years ago

An utterly commonplace article in itself, but to see this written by Don Box is surreal.

I fully agree. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335734

JMostert• 17 years ago

I feel like some qualification is in order. I can't make any excuses for SOAP (maybe someone else wants to take that up), but COM, at its core, is indeed a simple and dare I even say elegant technology. COM is alive and well on Windows, because it still serves a basic need (cross-language binary interop) and it does so well.

The problem is that COM just couldn't stay simple -- the basic idea of querying an object for reference-counted interfaces was quickly buried under incomprehensible layers of pUnkOuter and IMoniker and apartment states and OLE activation sites and god knows what other stuff that you have to know about but doesn't help you getting work done.

I've seen people who can get carried away adding layers of stuff to something simple and beautiful without ever realizing that it stopped being simple and beautiful quite a while ago, because they still understand everything. Boiling frog design, if you will. I don't know Don Box well enough to tell if he's one of those people, but COM and related technologies seem to have seen a lot of that crowd.

apotheon2• 17 years ago

It appears he was of that crowd:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335734

Scheme Is Love

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