4 ms·

Maxima? I mean, it traces its lineage to the golden age of Lisp, but it's still being released. And you say Scheme was friend-zoned by the industry. While I un

Maxima? I mean, it traces its lineage to the golden age of Lisp, but it's still being released. And you say Scheme was friend-zoned by the industry. While I understand why this was, it's a shame: Scheme is a very nice language, and with several high quality implementations, some excellent FFI, and finally some good library support (CHICKEN is excellent here), not to mention Racket's deluge of features and libraries (not really a fan of it myself, and it's not scheme, but I'm willing to admit it's a good system, to say nothing of impressive), it's finally slowly reaching the point where it might be usable in an industrial environment. Although it's not there yet, you can definitely write useful things in it.

jakub_h 10y ago
Chez took too long a time to get freed. Had this happened a decade earlier, it would have been nice.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  ? I didn't mention Chez. What's Chez got to do with it?
  - jakub_h 10y ago
    Earlier accessibility of a top Scheme implementation could have helped make it more popular earlier. Just like with Smalltalk and Common Lisp before which also got into trouble because of good implementations being out of reach of most people.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      What about SCM, T, Larceny, Bigloo, Gambit, Chicken, Guile, and Racket? All were open source before Chez. T, in particular, while no longer active, was at the time a pioneer of fast and effective scheme compilation.
      - jakub_h 10y ago
        One could make a number of arguments about at least half of these. Racket/PLT has been free for a long time but ten years ago, a friend of mine simply left it for Common Lisp for the sole reason of speed. Gambit is great - I'd say almost as good as Chez - but there's no proper modules or native multi-threading. The Scheme->C model is also cumbersome; reintroduction of a native compiler was promised but if I'm not mistaken, still hasn't happened (although some other interesting things did - the recent mobile code support is very interesting!). T was a research vehicle but apparently the closest thing to an accessible environment for it was A/UX on Mac. Say what you want about IBM PCs but they won.

jakub_h 10y ago

Chez took too long a time to get freed. Had this happened a decade earlier, it would have been nice.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
? I didn't mention Chez. What's Chez got to do with it?
- jakub_h 10y ago
  Earlier accessibility of a top Scheme implementation could have helped make it more popular earlier. Just like with Smalltalk and Common Lisp before which also got into trouble because of good implementations being out of reach of most people.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    What about SCM, T, Larceny, Bigloo, Gambit, Chicken, Guile, and Racket? All were open source before Chez. T, in particular, while no longer active, was at the time a pioneer of fast and effective scheme compilation.
    - jakub_h 10y ago
      One could make a number of arguments about at least half of these. Racket/PLT has been free for a long time but ten years ago, a friend of mine simply left it for Common Lisp for the sole reason of speed. Gambit is great - I'd say almost as good as Chez - but there's no proper modules or native multi-threading. The Scheme->C model is also cumbersome; reintroduction of a native compiler was promised but if I'm not mistaken, still hasn't happened (although some other interesting things did - the recent mobile code support is very interesting!). T was a research vehicle but apparently the closest thing to an accessible environment for it was A/UX on Mac. Say what you want about IBM PCs but they won.