Hi everyone.
Thank you for the quick and earnest responses. It is great to be involved with such great people. There are a lot of communities out there that laugh at newbies and give really bad responses to beginner-questions. The Gambit community is a great one to be in.
Here I will try to provide a quick introduction of myself :)
I am currently living in South Africa and I am 24. I have been developing software for about 7 years and it is what I love to do. I have been actively developing in the following technologies:
o) C/C++ o) Ruby/Rails o) PHP o) C# / APS.NET
I am currently busy working for a company doing a huge C# / ASP.NET project. However this is not really what I want to do.
I have recently discovered Common Lisp and the ideas and mechanisms really opened my eyes. I then read a lot about CL and eventually wondered into Scheme. I started writing some simple pieces of code in CL and was surprised: I loved it. I am a bit of a performance freak so I started looking around at many different LISP implementations, trying to find one that is well-supported, has a great community, is fast, and can be used to write commercial or enterprise applications. This road eventually led to Gambit (of course :) ).
So I found a love for CL and Scheme and I like Scheme just a bit more because it's very clean. So i started downloading and buying books on Scheme, including:
o) the little schemer o) the seasoned schemer o) LiSP in Small Pieces (quite a heavy read for me :))
Ok, now I have been developing Rich Internet application for a while now and love writing web applications. Then I thought it would be great if I can write web applications using Scheme :)
Most of my knowledge is self-taught because I love to read. There are no good CS courses here that cover Scheme / CL in great detail, so I am a bit green in this area.
Ok, so that intro was a bit longer than expected :)
Everything boils down to this basically: I love writing software in Scheme and would like to build big projects with the help of other, smarter individuals, learn a ton of new stuff and have fun in the process. I have been looking for an open source project to contribute to and I believe I have settled on Gambit. I want to move Scheme out of the academic light and into the "you can write serious business applications" light. So I am going to need a lot of help and input from the Gambit community :) (but I don't think that will be a problem).
I might not have all the experience or expertise for such a project, but I make up for it with enthusiasm and love of programming in Scheme :)
Ok so on to the scheme community's new web framework : "Scheme on Skis" (thanks Marc).
I will be actively involved in this project and will be spending my time gathering ideas from all you smart people :) I am currently setting up a website and will keep everyone posted. I would really like this project to be a community effort, so I am always open and listening to new ideas, comments, criticism, etc.
The goal is to build a stable web framework (using Gambit) that is blazingly fast, easy to use, and has good support for current web standards. I have elected myself not as the leader of this project, but simply an organizer. Any objections are welcome :) .
Anyone that has a component or is working on a component related to web applications are welcome to contact me. I welcome the use of already-developed modules that can simply be used in the web framework.
We also need to decide on branding for our Scheme on Skis, creating a slogan, logo, graphics etc. Any ideas are welcome.
There is a ton of stuff to do before we get started, but the most difficult part of any project is to get started. So this is an official start for Scheme on Skis :) I will be heavily relying on Marc and other individuals with lots of experience and I would like to thank everyone in advance.
Rouan.
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