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xscotttoday at 1:18 PM2 repliesview on HN

Scheme is (or at least was) coherent. You don't need to look any further than set/setf/setq to see that Common Lisp is "organically grown" from the fertilizer of a committee. CL does its best to make every other lisp more attractive.


Replies

rootnod3today at 1:22 PM

Which Scheme are we talking about? R5RS? R7RS-small? R6RS? With SRFIs? Without? Which scheme? Is it `(library...)` or `(define-module...)`?

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rahentoday at 2:50 PM

Scheme has a coherent and minimalist design, but its ecosystem and abstraction facilities feel too sparse for large applications.

When I started building a Lisp-based machine learning framework, Guile seemed like the right choice because it provides GOOPS and generic functions, yet I still ended up with a lot of boilerplate to compensate for the lack of a strong type system.

Scheme feels to me like C is to C++: not ergonomic for large-scale application development. Go is one of those languages that has both minimalism and productivity.