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0 pointszeveb7y ago0 comments

I don't mind that Scheme exists, but I do mind that enthusiasts naively use it to build production systems, because they end up wasting time & energy re-implementing things the Common Lisp standard already specifies rather than spending that time & energy on the problems that they're actually trying to solve.

Scheme is another Blub: a Scheme user looks at Common Lisp and thinks, 'hey, I don't need generic functions; I don't need packages; I don't want separate namespaces for separate things; I don't want to extend my reader.' Meanwhile someone who's built large systems in both Lisp & Scheme realises how glad he is to have those things.

Meanwhile, the ecosystems of non-Lisp-family languages grow ever-larger, and hence ever-more-appealing, which is a problem because while Scheme-the-language is better than Python-the-language or Go-the-language, Scheme-the-fractured-ecosystem is worse than Python-the-healthy-ecosystem or Go-the-astoundingly-robust-ecosystem, which means more people use Python & Go, which means fewer people use Lisp-family languages … it's a vicious cycle.

Which means the world is a worse place, stuck in a local maximum of C-family languages and unable to break out to the Lispy global maximum.

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rekado7y ago· 2 in thread

> Scheme is another Blub: a Scheme user looks at Common Lisp and thinks, 'hey, I don't need generic functions; I don't need packages; I don't want separate namespaces for separate things; I don't want to extend my reader.' Meanwhile someone who's built large systems in both Lisp & Scheme realises how glad he is to have those things.

I find this list a little funny, because we do have generic functions, packages, and the ability to extend the reader. In Guix we use reader extensions for G-expressions, for example.

I grant you the separate namespaces thing, because, well, we really don't want to have a separate namespace for variables and procedures :)

zevebOP7y ago

> I find this list a little funny, because we do have generic functions, packages, and the ability to extend the reader.

But those are all non-standard, right? At least, I quickly skimmed through R7RS & don't see them in there. So they're either Guile-specific extensions, or your project implemented them, or they are a third-party library which has not undergone the same scrutiny as the standard itself.

FWIW, I find that having many namespaces (not just two!) rather than one is conducive to good program design.

kazinator7y ago

"I understand and do want all these things, but don't need them coming from an ANSI/ISO standard" is substantially different from the Blub Paradox.

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