Anyone here a LISP/schemer?
LISP and schemes have always, from a distance appeared to be the best way to write code. I even started my own language that has languished for the past couple years, and it's taken on a pseudo-likeness to (scheme)-like languages by accident.
This brings me to my questions -
- How did you start?
- Does anyone here do systems-level scheme/lisp? what do you program in for that?
My why on learning lisp/scheme-like languages, and if anyone knows Chez.
I find the idea of CLI-inspired languages as one of the best possible ways of writing a language, and lisp is very nearly exactly that, it's just how my mind thinks about code, in a procedural/functional/modular way. This is one of the reasons I adore programming in Odin, as it's a modern systems-level procedural language, but it is not a scheme/lisp-like language. I should note, I abhor working with REPLs, but I can learn to live with it.
Corollary, as I am sure the audience for this is even smaller, ignore if you haven't a clue - but I am incredibly interested in Chez, for the performance metrics, the systems design, and the whole lot - yet there aren't any real resources other than the manual to learn. As I am not a native schemer, it's almost alien, and a bit hard to get right into and make something useful. Does anyone know of any good resources for this?
I've played around a few times but it never really clicked for me in terms of figuring out what it is best at. I feel like scheme is a really good educational tool for learning how to design languages and getting people to think creatively about hard problems but as a tool itself I'm not sure when I'd use it when I could use
golang(totally different I know but the standard library is written really well it makes a lot of systems programming footguns melt away--just try it for a day or two if you haven't).I think LISPs work really well for interactive scripting environments: competing with JavaScript or Lua. But of course you can do anything with anything--this is just how I feel.
You might like the Future of Coding slack community (which was renamed to Feeling of Computing...). People share lots of baroque and esoteric ideas which are often thought-provoking. Mariano Guerra provides a weekly digest newsletter of the "best of" discussions each week if you prefer email:
https://feelingof.com/community/
The only scheme-like programming I've ever done was a brief stint with Extempore's xtlang. It's a whole programming environment/runtime/stack, primarily used for multimedia livecoding. I arranged and performed a piece with it for a class in college, and holy cow it was awesome. I don't think I could imagine doing the same thing with a C-like programming language — the live editing just felt very approachable and natural with xtlang's closure syntax. Extempore's whole thing is that you can dynamically recompile individual closures without interrupting the multimedia loop.