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vatsachaktoday at 4:23 PM3 repliesview on HN

I've never seen the appeal in schemes other than hot reloadability...


Replies

so-cal-schemertoday at 9:08 PM

Lisp/Scheme/Racket is a very simple language that is also very fluid and malleable. You can express ideas and computations very precisely, concisely, and intuitively. There really aren't any barriers as they (Scheme/Racket at least) are rooted in the Lambda Calculus which is a theoretical model equivalent to the Turing Machine. Any language feature you'd like can be expressed: Want standard infix math expressions or a borrow-checker? That's a macro. Want lazy evaluation? That's a simple change in a meta-circular evaluator. Want a language that is the simplest and most direct mapping to your problem domain? A DSL.

The syntax lends itself to easy structural editing way before LSPs..

Why Racket? Why Lisp?

https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-racket-why-lisp.htm...

Why language-oriented programming? Why Racket?

https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-lop-why-racket.html

Creating Languages in Racket: Sometimes you just have to make a better mousetrap.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2068896

Lisp is clay: the power of composable DSLs

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/HDE7JZ-lisp-is-clay/

The other powers of Lisps (interactive development, hot reloadability, restarts on error, etc) are more tied to the sophistication of their implementations and runtime environments.

WalterGRtoday at 4:26 PM

Homoiconicity.

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