Scheme to become two languages

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3582

by apgwoz • 17 years ago

84 49 17 years ago

andreyf• 17 years ago

How can anyone think that deciding on expressions of computation should be done by committee? Imagine mathematicians were to get together to agree on standardized terminology for papers - what a waste of time it would be!

thunk• 17 years ago

Assuming you're not being facetious, I happen to think mathematics would be more advanced today if a little attention was paid to standardizing its notation:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=733265

But don't take that as enthusiasm for committees.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

Almost no one is enthusiastic about committees. That doesn't make them any less of a necessary evil.

sandGorgon• 17 years ago

   '''I happen to think mathematics would be

more advanced today if a little attention was paid to standardizing its notation'''

... as well as the tools available to render those notations.

http://www.stixfonts.org/pub_geninfo.html

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

marcusbooster• 17 years ago

It seemed to work fine for Haskell.

viraptor• 17 years ago

Really? There are still people who want a rewrite of Haskell's number types to organise it better (numeric prelude). Mainly for stuff like types that implement addition, but multiplication doesn't work for them.

And one would think that implementing math is easy ;)

drobilla• 17 years ago

That is exactly why one of the goals needs to be a small, understandable, core.

Committees degrade into uselessness when the discussion degrades into warring over features. Everyone has a pet feature, and nobody lets their pet feature go.

When you have a stated goal of minimalism (for at least part of the greater thing you're trying to define), then the argument to include this or that can be a /logical/ one based on whether it is actually /required/.

jknupp• 17 years ago

Actually, it's not being split at all. There's going to be a "small" variant that is a proper subset of the "large", or complete variant. Small would just be a reduced feature set.

Tichy7• 17 years ago

Why do languages always have to evolve? On average, do languages get better over time or do they deteriorate? I am sure that Java has deteriorated a lot.

Keep it simple, please!

noss• 17 years ago

Yes, things used to be better. It's the decay of the youth.

Tichy7• 17 years ago

No, but maybe featuritis is how languages die, to be replaced by newer, simpler languages.

gnaritas• 17 years ago

Java was never simple. Scheme is simple, Smalltalk is simple, Java was always a beast.

Tichy7• 17 years ago

Probably, but they still managed to make it far worse (generics, annotations, ...).

whye• 17 years ago

Lua started out as a configuration language in 1993 and since then has evolved into a more general purpose language that is cleaner, yet more flexible and powerful. It has gotten much better with time.

for more information, see: The Evolution of Lua - http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/hopl.pdf

polos2• 17 years ago

We already have both Theory Focused Lisp (Scheme) and Practice Focused Lisp (CL).

What did I (sorry, I meant you :) miss?

herdrick2• 17 years ago

The idea is that Scheme has been controlled by the expansionists lately and has gotten pretty large and practical.

As for why people don't just use CL, Scheme isn't laden with the historical mistakes that Common Lisp is, Scheme is still capable of evolving, and "large Scheme" is much more approachable to beginners than CL because of DrScheme and other efforts of the PLT people. And some people just like Scheme's approach better.

polos2• 17 years ago

historical mistakes (regarding CL) is only an opinion, not a fact.

For many aspects it's a huge advantage of CL to not having continuously evolve into something slightly different and only opinionatedly better.

I know both Scheme and CL, and I'll continue to prefer CL for at least the next decade coming, I think.

Meantime, I like all the effort anybody is putting in any kind of Lisp, and I always follow the different attempts (the different Schemes, Arc, Clojure).

icey• 17 years ago

You missed this paren: )

apotheon5• 17 years ago

This kinda looks like a linkjacked version of that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777666

silentbicycle• 17 years ago

It's on Lambda the Ultimate, which is a well-known programming language theory discussion site. While the link could have been to the steering committee statement, the signal-to-noise ratio for LtU's discussion will probably be on par with HN's.

It's worth browsing their archives (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/lambda-archive1.html) sometime, when you have a couple hours. Great stuff. (I'm only posting the link because it's a Friday afternoon. ;) )

apotheon5• 17 years ago

Oh, I read stuff there from time to time, and it's often interesting. I just didn't see anything in the original posting at LtU that made me think "Yes, it was definitely important to submit this instead of the actual meat of the matter."

apgwoz2• 17 years ago

I linked to it specifically for the discussion that LtU has on the matter.

apotheon5• 17 years ago

Fair 'nuff. Upvoted.

I just don't usually like to read discussion in two separate places of the same topic. It gets tedious. I guess it's a matter of personal taste.

cesare• 17 years ago

This is a great idea.

To keep a standard subset for lightweight implementations (which are better suited for embedded systems, or for being embedded as a scripting language). How cool is this?

Edit: not to mention that a greater portability among the full featured implementations would be even more cool.

I'm so happy to see Scheme alive and kicking.

runinit2• 17 years ago

I'm currently planning out a project that involves building a OSC controller using an ARM chip. I hope I will be able to use scheme to write the firmware for the device, that would be swell (and much more fun than using ASM).

kragen2• 17 years ago

How do you like Lua?

MaysonL• 17 years ago

Check out this: http://arcfn.com/2009/08/arc-arduino-arm-temperature-monitor...

The guy is running an Arc (pg's Lisp, currently implemented in mzscheme) web server on his Arm-based SheevaPlug.

coryrc• 17 years ago

Pre-scheme.

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

I experimented with other languages/things before for embedded programming. I think forth would be great if it worked the way my brain does. Otherwise, there are good reasons everybody uses C.

Scheme to become two languages

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