Re: In search of cool Scheme

[Sam Tregar]

As much as I would enjoy a good Perl-V-Scheme language war, at least at
first, I'm going to resist the temptation.  If you truly want to know what
I think Perl has going for it that Scheme lacks (*cough* CPAN *cough*
community *cough*)  then you may feel free to contact me privately.

Now, on to your less flame-worthy thoughts:

On 22 May 2001, Alex Shinn wrote:

> Likewise, the one "feature" of Scheme which is hard to reproduce in
> Perl is the minimal syntax.  This makes it easy to parse and build
> dynamic Scheme.  For example, the structure of Scheme is very similar
> to XML, and there's an XML parser at
>
>   http://www.lh.com/~oleg/ftp/Scheme/xml.html

That does look interesting, but I don't know how I can turn that into a
nice snippet...  Thanks for the pointer though.  Maybe I can troll the
source for some inspiration.

> If you search on /. for recent articles about Yahoo and/or Lisp, there
> was one recently where the creator of Yahoo Store explains he was so
> successful because he chose Lisp as a language, and cited macros as
> the single most important feature.  Scheme provides two types of
> macros, one like Lisp and a cleaner version (syntax rules).

Actually, that's why I'm here!  I read that article and had a sudden urge
to do something with Scheme.  I learned a bit in school and enjoyed it...
Now I'd like to see if I can find a place for Scheme in my work as a
web application developer.  At least for me that means I need a Perl
interface.  Hence Guile.pm and Inline::Guile - coming soon to a theater
near you.

> So I guess the advantages are more subtle, and thus it's hard to come
> up with cute little code snippets of things that are hard in Perl.
> Maybe something using force/delay or string-port handling?  You can do
> interesting things with continuations, but that might just scare
> people away :-)

Well, you've given me some interesting ideas.  Perhaps the whole idea of
"tiny bit of magic code" is too Perlish to begin with.  Still, I
definitely have to find something better than "Hello, world.".

Thanks,
-sam