4 ms·

I have working knowledge of C, C++, Scheme, and a little bit of Python, but I really don't think Scheme is true to all its hype. I'm not even sure if everyone p

I have working knowledge of C, C++, Scheme, and a little bit of Python, but I really don't think Scheme is true to all its hype. I'm not even sure if everyone praising it here is using it in real life projects or not or only academically. We do, and man, the tough life is with it. The only debugging we have here is numerous "format (print)" statements, it is terribly slow, and may be not everyone's using it as intended, but the way it promotes "lists" for everything is just plain wrong IMHO. End result, a lot of wrongful uses of searching in lists where a proper C/C++ data structure would prove much faster. Oh, and the deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code.

peatmoss 8y ago
> deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code. Oh, how I wish I could share the joy I experience using Paredit with those parentheses. Paredit turns parentheses from an inconvenience into a turbo button for modifying code at an entirely new level of abstraction. When you started coding, you probably used an editor that worked on units that were single characters. Think Notepad. Then maybe you learned a programmers editor like Emacs, Vim, or Atom or Sublime. There you learned to cut, copy, fold, spindle, and mutilate code in lines or paragraphs. But Paredit... oh Paredit... now you have the tools to work with your code not in characters, lines, or paragraphs, but in code forms—the same stuff your code is made from. And the best part is that Paredit doesn’t have to have a deep knowledge of your code, groping imperfectly like Intellisense. Paredit is deterministic and easy to implement. If I could have an S-expression based version of every other language simply for paredit, I'd take it. Now a story for a different day is how much I hate typing commas in non-lisps.
bjoli 8y ago
Which scheme are you using? Chez, chicken, guile and gambit all have pretty good debugging facilities, and a macro like chez's trace-lambda is a lot better than misusing print-debugging in most cases. Nobody ever said most list operations is anything else than o(n), and if you are using lists you are probably using the wrong data structure. Vectors or hash tables would probably be a better choice (which are provided by all serious schemes).
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  Ours is probably some 20 years old initial MIT Scheme implementation added with homegrown features like "Object Oriented Scheme" etc., but a debugger was never implemented for the same. Talks have been going on to move to an implementation that has a debugger, but at such a scale changing that would be difficult.
  - stutonk 8y ago
    By MIT scheme, do you mean MIT/GNU scheme? A few schemes implement their debuggers in terms of call/cc (or delimited counterparts) and exceptional conditions like errors or breaks hand control to a new 'depth' of REPL where anything in the environment can be inspected (or redefined) in-context before possibly trying to continue or doing any unwinding. If your scheme has no debugging apparatus, it shouldn't be too hard to implement something a little more useful than sprinkling in print statements. Even without wading into continuations, implementing a macro that does tracing should be possible.
  - bjoli 8y ago
    Ouch... That seems painful and really like someone made a wrong decision 20 years ago. Back then scheme was a pretty inane choice compared to CL. That is not as much the case today, regardless of what the CLers say :)

peatmoss 8y ago

> deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code. Oh, how I wish I could share the joy I experience using Paredit with those parentheses. Paredit turns parentheses from an inconvenience into a turbo button for modifying code at an entirely new level of abstraction. When you started coding, you probably used an editor that worked on units that were single characters. Think Notepad. Then maybe you learned a programmers editor like Emacs, Vim, or Atom or Sublime. There you learned to cut, copy, fold, spindle, and mutilate code in lines or paragraphs. But Paredit... oh Paredit... now you have the tools to work with your code not in characters, lines, or paragraphs, but in code forms—the same stuff your code is made from. And the best part is that Paredit doesn’t have to have a deep knowledge of your code, groping imperfectly like Intellisense. Paredit is deterministic and easy to implement. If I could have an S-expression based version of every other language simply for paredit, I'd take it. Now a story for a different day is how much I hate typing commas in non-lisps.

bjoli 8y ago

Which scheme are you using? Chez, chicken, guile and gambit all have pretty good debugging facilities, and a macro like chez's trace-lambda is a lot better than misusing print-debugging in most cases. Nobody ever said most list operations is anything else than o(n), and if you are using lists you are probably using the wrong data structure. Vectors or hash tables would probably be a better choice (which are provided by all serious schemes).

piyush_soni 8y ago
Ours is probably some 20 years old initial MIT Scheme implementation added with homegrown features like "Object Oriented Scheme" etc., but a debugger was never implemented for the same. Talks have been going on to move to an implementation that has a debugger, but at such a scale changing that would be difficult.
- stutonk 8y ago
  By MIT scheme, do you mean MIT/GNU scheme? A few schemes implement their debuggers in terms of call/cc (or delimited counterparts) and exceptional conditions like errors or breaks hand control to a new 'depth' of REPL where anything in the environment can be inspected (or redefined) in-context before possibly trying to continue or doing any unwinding. If your scheme has no debugging apparatus, it shouldn't be too hard to implement something a little more useful than sprinkling in print statements. Even without wading into continuations, implementing a macro that does tracing should be possible.
- bjoli 8y ago
  Ouch... That seems painful and really like someone made a wrong decision 20 years ago. Back then scheme was a pretty inane choice compared to CL. That is not as much the case today, regardless of what the CLers say :)