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It really all depends on what one wants. If one wants an excellent academic exercise, Scheme is pretty great. If one wants an excellent industrial language, C
by eadmund 7y ago
It really all depends on what one wants. If one wants an excellent academic exercise, Scheme is pretty great. If one wants an excellent industrial language, Common Lisp is right there.
I am sympathetic to R6RS because it tries to make Scheme more useful for real programming — but in that case why not just use Common Lisp, which is even more useful for that purpose?
- codeflo 7y agoI’m not convinced CL is more useful for real world usage. People sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that more features are always better. With programming languages, that’s rarely true, because even features you don’t use cost you something — in terms of training new programmers, and every time your dealing with other people’s code. (And note here that in real-world projects, most of the code you have to modify and debug isn’t yours!) Of course it’s possible to go too far the other way, and R5RS leaves too many questions unanswered. But in my opinion, simplicity is also an important feature, not just academically, but in practice.
- lispm 7y agoSince one doesn't program in R5RS (a language definition document), but with real implementations, those tend to add quite a bit to Scheme to make practical programming possible. Example: https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/mit-scheme-ref/index.html https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/mit-sc...
- codeflo 7y agoSure, but the point of a standard is usually to make implementations interchangeable.