[klutometis]

I've been using Chicken for five years to fulfill contracts for military, biotech and publishing clients.

While I set out at first to disprove the axiom that "Scheme is not commercially viable;" Chicken is now my preferred method of writing performant, robust and literate code.

[snippyhollow]

May you tell us more about it? (For things you can speak about.)

[klutometis]

I delivered a bizarre product for PSYOP [1] that involves crafting "lines of persuasion" for target audiences; another that prescribes chemotherapy regimens based on genetic profiles of tumors; and finally a wiki → docbook → latex compiler for textbooks.

A few things that really came in handy: XML ↔ S-expression equivalence (for writing functional XML parsers); code-data unification (for structurally composing documents); arbitrary precision arithmetic; etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_(Unite...

[tomjen3]

What kinds of tools do you use to write literate scheme programs? It seems mighty interesting.

[klutometis]

Org-mode [1], actually; it has various mechanisms for embedding source code fragments in documents. The fragments can be evaluated when exporting to PDF, for instance; listed; or "tangled" (extracted) and compiled.

My projects usually evolve from a TODO file with source-code fragments for subproblems; then, by a process of conjugation, the fragments are tangled into viable products.

The TODO captures the evolution of the project, and follows the trajectory of eventually accepted or rejected ideas.

[1] http://orgmode.org/guide/Working-With-Source-Code.html

[cpeterso]

> I've been using Chicken for five years to fulfill contracts for military, biotech and publishing clients.

Do the contracts specify any language requirements, considering the organization may eventually maintain the old themselves.

And, in your experience, do any military projects still require Ada? :)

[klutometis]

> Do the contracts specify any language requirements . . .

They did; and, in some cases, I risked losing my job by writing in Scheme. I eventually prevailed, however; and, in one case, converted a Python shop.

> And, in your experience, do any military projects still require Ada?

Java more than Ada, in my experience; but I wonder if Ada's niche isn't aviation and other real-time systems.