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Some people might find playing with programming languages a fun exercise, but many of us just want to build shit that works. Scheme might be the best thing ever

Some people might find playing with programming languages a fun exercise, but many of us just want to build shit that works. Scheme might be the best thing ever, but the two operating systems I develop on have native APIs written in Objective-C and C++, respectively. (If you're wondering, the two operating systems I'm talking about are Mac OS X and Haiku.) IMO, Python is a great choice. Simple, clean language with a ton of APIs. I'm sure 90% of people out there will prefer hacking together quickie games using Python and PyGame to playing with continuations in Scheme. PS: I don't wish to imply that Scheme is a bad programming language. In fact, I've been mucking about with Scheme for the past week or so.

_phred 17y ago
Scheme has always been interesting to me. It gets really interesting when you have a Scheme with a C FFI, as discussed here: http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/07/19/gambit-scheme-app-development/ http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/07/19/gambit-scheme-app-devel... Using the FFI, I could write my application code, low-level graphics calls, etc. in C or C++ or Objective-C, and call into my Scheme code at appropriate points. Gambit Scheme, discussed in that article, has a remote debugger as well, which has its own set of interesting possibilities. I guess I'm thinking mostly of Scheme for games and simulations, which seem more natural to me to express with a clean functional language like Scheme.
jcl 17y ago
Of course, if you wanted to hack together a language that compiled a single source to both Objective-C and C++, Scheme would be a pretty good environment in which to prototype it.