You have some nice ideas.
Now, if only someone could be persuaded to donate five or six years of his life to implement some of them we schemers would certainly be happy.
Cheers P.
2009/6/7, Adrien Piérard pierarda@iro.umontreal.ca:
Hello everyone.
As others here too I guess, I do not program only in Scheme, and I also keep myself informed of what happens around in the Common Lisp, Haskell or ML communities (since I have a functional programming bias). I believe that most of you are aware of the impressive fame of Haskell and its main implementation GHC, and I would even consider betting that "do it in a monad" will soon belong to the dialect of the IT marketing teams and deciders. Let's see what I think helped the buzz spread, let alone the language itself:
- cabal: convenient and community friendly way to share, downloade and
builp code.
- Haskell platform: on click under windows, and you have a fully set
up system with all-you-need-ready-to-use (c).
- spare time: every single library coded by haskell users somehow
ended up in the community shared code base. No need to redo what's already done.
- communication: the haskell weekly news: state of the art, blogs, and
IRC quotes. The community is alive and shows it to the world.
I guess that the closest to this in "our" (very split) community is PLT-scheme. Yet, I think that Gambit too is somehow evolving along a bigger and bigger user base, but may benefit from more development targetting the (potential) users rathers that its speed or efficiency.
=========== Suggested improvements to Gambit:
- We have a dumping ground, which slowly but surely grows. I think
that it is now time to reconsider doing a CPAN-like or cabal-like system for Gambit. Users/programmers should be suggested to put there any single line of once-useful code, without fearing comments regarding quality or else. If someone wants this code but finds it slow, it'll be patched… Snow has tried to do that, but portability killed i.(I gave up portabililty a while ago).
- I haven't tried blackhole yet, don't know its limitations, but if it
is good, let's make in part of Gambit (even as an external branch or whatever).
- A better explanaition of of it diverges from pure RnRS (that is,
emphasize on define-type, non-blocking IOs, and so on), and how it makes it relevent for most real-life programming tasks.
- Involve the community and code the wish-list (or at least, give a
guided tour of gambit's internals and of its where-is-whats) so that some may consider implementing those requests themselves.
=========== Suggested improvements to Scheme:
- We have #scheme on Freenode that is lively and wealthy. We have
scheme.dk/planet which is lively and wealthy too (I just wished Grant could stop twittering on it and make real posts with more than 134 characters that all start like "here is ...". Grant, if you read this :P) Now, maybe a publication could be useful too, monthly at first, maybe unofficial, that sums up recent activity, from "XXX now runs on the iPhone, to "John Doe got a Scheme job at Great Compagny Inc", not forgetting Prof. Farnsworth's latest paper on continuations".
I may be stating the obvious, but I felt the urge to share it (so much that I wrote this too quickly and will probably regret having sent it)…
P!
-- Français, English, 日本語, 한국어 _______________________________________________ Gambit-list mailing list Gambit-list@iro.umontreal.ca https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list