On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 12:03:54PM +0900, Alex Shinn wrote: > > Hello Rouben! You probably don't remember me, it's > been years since I took your diff eqs class :)
Hello Alex. I certainly remember you by the name but I cannot honestly say that I remember your face from the nearly two decades ago. Anyway, I am very happy to see your involvement in the Scheme Working Groups. Those committees do a great service to the community, despite the flak that they get from it at times. My interest in Scheme is as a hobbyist rather than that of a serious user. I see myself as an onlooker who views Scheme from the outside. From my perspective, Scheme is a very neat language whose knowledge can be quite rewarding. Learning it has certainly expanded my horizons and has influenced the way I think and program in C which is my primary programming language. My wish is that there will come one day when the Scheme community will rally around a stable, useful, compact, and standardized language, and that all major implementations will make it their goals to implement that standard. I want to emphasize the "compact". A language that throws in everything, including the kitchen sink, in order to appease the critics won't serve that purpose. If I want Common Lisp, I know where to find it. A language standard that is widely implemented and supported matters a lot to me. I don't want to lock myself it into a specific implementation. If I spend my time and energy into coding an algorithm, I want some assurance that if the implementation X ceases to exist, my code still will run on implementation Y. Right now I have Bigloo, Guile, Larceny, and Racket on my laptop. I also have several smallish projects that I have written in Scheme over the years. Not a /single/ one is portable. Each one is locked into the implementation for which it was written. In a few cases I have ported a project from one implementation to another while cursing the state of affairs that has necessitated such a waste of effort. Anyway, I am wishing the best for you and your committees and hope that R7RS will bring us closer to a widely supported and implemented Scheme standard. Rouben ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
