On 2011-10-20, at 12:49 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
Le 2011-10-20 à 12:40:00, Marc Feeley a écrit :
In the 90's, when Brendan Eich was at Netscape he needed to implement a scripting language for the Netscape browser. He initially implemented a Scheme interpreter, but that morphed into JavaScript. The syntaxes are very different, but the fundamental features are there (dynamic typing, eval, closures, symbols/immutable-strings, lists/flexible-arrays).
This description also fits Ruby, Lua, and some others. Which languages are on-topic ?
Flame bait?
Yes I think JavaScript, Ruby and Lua (and let's not forget Erlang) are Lisp cousins. I prefer to be inclusive, rather than exclusive. It is not so much about the language's name as it is what we learn from the presentation that we can apply to our Scheme/Lisp context. A presentation on how language X does garbage collection, or interface to foreign functions, might give a Schemer some thoughts to think about. Obviously, the further away the language is from Scheme, the more unlikely it is that there will be an application to Scheme. I think it is best to be open minded and invite the most interesting presentations.
Marc