David Wilson
Long term, my goal is to make Scheme appealing to a wider audience, primarily through tutorials and demonstrations. Obviously there are plenty of Scheme developers already, and even more thanks to Guix, but I still don't think the language gets the admiration that it deserves. 14 comments
David Wilson
@tahnu The one I would recommend for practical purposes in the short term is Guile because it has a solid compiler, good library support, and has been well proven through its use in Guix. I'm also working on my own Scheme implementation which intends to be practical and tailored for personal hacking, but it's not quite ready for use.
Alex 🇮🇹 💛 🇷🇺
Michal Atlas
@daviwil In my very subjective opinion, one of the problems would be choice paralysis and kinda related to that the lack of enough standardisation.
Michal Atlas
@daviwil And in the end for example I have the choice between learning Common Lisp and where the quirks lie, or the absolutely brilliant but separate languages/ways of doing stuff in Guile, Racket, Chez, ... That's my feeling and I am ofc using Guile right now for many of my things, it was a strange choice to make in the beginning and hadn't it been for Guix I wouldn't have been able to make it I think. 
blake shaw 🇵🇸
@michal_atlas @daviwil you can use r7rs by starting guile with --r7rs, or in the repl with Guile's r7rs and r6rs support is pretty good, but not complete, and there are some tiny divergences you have to figure out. But its good enough to build akku.
blake shaw 🇵🇸
@michal_atlas @daviwil (if you're interested in r7rs in particular, which is generally pretty portable, I'd recommend going with an r7rs implementation like Chibi, and using akku to sort out the cross-implementation compatibility for you) 
dave
@rml @michal_atlas @daviwil we're implementing r7rs small for the wasm compiler so I wonder if any of that work will fill in some gaps.
Michal Atlas
@rml @daviwil Yessss, r7rs in general is awesome and something I'm massively looking forward to getting more widespread and I'm very grateful for its existence and all the work people pour into it. I was just voicing my subjective view on why it might be overwhelming for newcomers right now. And I also have to finally check out this akku thing I keep hearing about, thank you for reminding me. 
Ludovic Courtès
@daviwil To me it’s not so much about “admiration”: I’m convinced Scheme is a great vehicle to achieve programming literacy and, beyond that, emancipation. More tutorials, demos, etc. are definitely the way to make progress!  |
Gregory's Server
@daviwil Which of the Schemes do you bet on?