In this video, I'll give you 5 reasons why I think you should learn Scheme this year! Regardless if you are a programming beginner or an expert hacker, there is a lot to be gained from learning this language.
I think something the scheme community could learn from Haskell is to lean-in on it's prestige. I see so many people post about how they were never able to figure out how to use scheme in any practical way, and most schemers I've spoke to said it took them about a year to get really compfortable. But I think the #scheme community has traditionally advertised it as "so easy, you can learn it in an afternoon!", and so people, often times already coming from some other #lisp like #clojure, expect to be able to just pick it up, and when they fail to they think the language is lacking. But nobody comes to #Haskell with such expectations, and the Haskell community never advertised it as super easy and quick to learn. In my experience, Haskell has always been sold as "takes time to learn, but is worth it".
To be fair, I think Haskell will continue to fill the niche it filled ~10 years ago, around the time it started to get mainstream hype. Small teams of skilled devs delivering robust products that would normally require much larger teams to maintain will continue to prevail. Purely functional lazy programming was never bound for world domination in an economy which is antagnostic to curiosity, creativity and truths.
On the other hand, I have the feeling that we're going to see more and more Haskellers-turned-Rustaceans come to realize that #Rust does little to alleviate the primary barrier to Haskell's wider success -- fast and predictable turnaround time for projects developing cutting-edge technologies -- and will wind up going the same route as some major Haskell projects such as #Unison and #Idris have in recent years, which is to try #Chez Scheme, only to discover that it allows them to release blazing fast functional programs on a generic foundation where major breaking changes are practically non-existent, providing incredible flexibility while significantly reducing dependencies by dint of the ad-hoc tooling that falls out of the bottom of #scheme. Not to mention the joys that come from near-instant startup times, some of the fastest compile time you've ever encountered, fully-customizable interactive development and a surgical #debugger that rivals Haskell in scheer fun. Yesterdays naysayers will become tomorrow's enthusiastic bootstrappers. Or a at least a boy can dream.
That said, in all seriousness I don't think Scheme will ever reach the heights of Haskell's moderate commercial success. But I do think that projects built on Scheme, like Unison, will get a leg up and eventually surpass it, and interest in #lisp will only grow.
If you've got questions about Emacs, Guix, Guile, or other related topics and want a friendly place to ask them, come check out the new System Crafters Forum!
I'm writing these hashes of hashes of whatever in ruby and thinking.... golly i wish i was using lisp.
...
That being said, i !@#$! hate every hash/dictionary implementation i've ever encountered in a lisp or scheme.
100% writing macros to give me ruby/pythonish dictionary interactions.
If you know of a lisp that does this well PLEASE let me know.
I wanna say that the magic of #scheme is that it allows you to rapidly develop toy models of novel programs that you're unlikely to encounter without it (due to its unparalleled flexibility), but I worry that risks perpetuating the idea that its a toy language, which is anything but the case.
toy models are at the heart of many of modernity's greatest breakthroughs, and I'm yet to encounter another language that offers the flexibility of thought required to live up to the name.
Whats a good server with cool hackers who are accepting of BDS activists? I just found out thats off topic here, with lots of ppl complaining. I 90% just post about #lisp & #scheme, but when political events involving movements im apart of crop up, I dont want to want to hold my tounge.
One more reason why it's hard to use alists as associative data structure: There is no built-in destructuring capabilities for it. It seems (ice-9 match) is no help here. Situation becomes even worse if we have a nested data structure.
Going to stack a bunch of let+assoc-ref's I guess.
Feeling silly, so I'm replacing all lambda' occurrences in my #guix home configuration with λ' because nobody can tell me what to do! :ac_happy:
I would feel awkward doing this in a project shared with anyone, but I'm not sure why... I feel like this will break things somehow, or present unforeseen challenges...
"Oh, cool. the guile-lib package has an asynchronous message queue! I can use that... Hmm, it seems there are a few different efforts on Akku to pull in a bunch of portable code into a single library. I had better bookmark these... oh, wow, Guile 3.0 has SRFI-171 (Transducers) built-in now! Amazing! I need to rewrite that algorithm I wrote last time to use Transducers... Oh wow, so when you parse XML you don't need to parse the whole structure into memory, you can use Oleg Kiselyov's SSAX framework and just supply callbacks that are triggered as each part of the tree is parsed, discarding the parts you don't need... so now how do you... oh, NOW I get it! So the (cond ((VALUE GUARD => LAMBDA))) syntax specified in SRFI-61 lets you test the value then applies it to a function if the test passes! So you can combine that with things like Transducers and SSAX to create super-advanced queries over various data structures... now this is starting to make sense..." (falls asleep at desk)
"The focus of my research is applying #fp, in particular #chez#scheme, to low-level problems — the type of situations that usually call for #rust or #c"
— highly recommended talk on programming with serialized data from @vollmerm @ #ELSconf
I'm a book learner. I feel like I can learn anything that there is at least one incredible book dedicated to, but without literature I can sink my teeth into, I will never succeed in picking up a new skill distinct from those I already possess.
TLDR: looking for a genuinely good #CSS book that gets into the meaty bits and doesn't treat the reader like toddler.
Around the time of covid, I decided I was going to tear down my react website that I hated ever since it went up, and build it with just HTML & CSS. So I did what any yak shaver would do, and built an ad-hoc CSS preprocessor in #Scheme, without knowing anything about modern CSS. And it worked well enough at first, but in the process I started to learn about all the new features of CSS (I'm not a webdev), and so I figured I should first dive in and then design a DSL that enables "Graphic Design By Wishful Thinkful", originally intending to use #miniKanren for relational styling & generative design patterns. But every CSS book I tried was simply "do this example and another one, and another, accumulate lots of examples without any insight into CSS design strategy", and my AuDHD can't handle that — I need something worth fixating on or I'm doomed. And thus I've gone without a website for years, and accumulated lots of blog entries in my zettlekasten which I still have yet to share.
But I also can't let go of the idea of creating a system that would make a JS-free website enjoyable for me to maintain, and I've always found writing CSS to be painfully tedious and time consuming, a google oriented configuration process, while I also recognize how powerful it is.
And I also have genuine aesthetic/design skills! I've been hired to create installations for Hermes, Adidas, Nike, and countless others, all around the world. My "art" has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, and countless major venues from Pioneer Works to the Brooklyn Museum (before public funds became illegal to grant to BDS activists, and I subsequently dropped out of an art world that will readily obey and tally the State's red lines we cross and work to keep us in check, excluding not only BDS activists but also Marxist-Leninists, Korean unification activists and other uncompromising dissidents). But I havent found any good book that makes CSS interesting, although I believe that it genuinely is.
So what is the best resource for getting deep with modern CSS? Does it even exist?! I feel like it must.