[GuestFAUniverse]

Where's the "practical" one that site really reflected?

I liked scheme as a learning tool and got highest grades. That doesn't change my impression that most of the sites covering it are mental masturbation. Puzzles, or programs for the sake of scheme itself. Where's the stuff to solve real world problems? (OK, mostly solved by other languages anyway... Still: where is the content that really wants a junior to try it out for routine problems and the senior tonstay with it?)

[cess11]

Due to the R-series of standards there are actually quite a lot of libraries you can use.

I'm not sure what you mean by "real world problems" but I think most would consider Cisco router firmware to be in that domain. In some sense, due to Cisco the Internet runs on two Lisp-like programming languages: Erlang and Chez.

If you look at TFA you'll find that it links over to a few articles that describe inventing a Scheme to solve things like high paced computer graphics production and large scale inventories.

[andrewflnr]

Erlang is really not lisp-like beyond being functional. It's not especially homoiconic, much stricter about mutation than most lisps, and overall has a different focus. IIRC it started as a Prolog dialect, and I think it's still closer to that legacy than anything particularly lispy.

[cess11]

I invite people to try it out and then get back to us and tell us who is more right.

[andrewflnr]

I have written both Erlang and Scheme (and even more Elixir). Have you? They're quite distinct.

I'm genuinely confused why you would be convinced about this. What are the points of similarity that aren't common to all functional languages?

[GuestFAUniverse]

That might be. TCL has/had? a niche there too.

What I meant was: where are the resources that teach how to tackle everyday chores? O'Reilly has a lot of "Real world <niche lang.>".

Not finished "practical" software -- albeit it's utterly cool to see that there are working projects in numbers / good showcases.

It's fine to have a collection for scheme (like the endless and sometimes helpful "awesome x" collections).

I'm missing the "Automate the boring stuff" and the like.

Maybe I'm more irritated about the lack of adoption (and grumpy about that -- not really the OP). E.g. I don't get it that Nix has more outreach than Guix, despite even Nix-users sometimes agree that the language isn't a strong selling point (I don't know about the idiosyncrasies of Guile, seemed preferable at first glance).

[noosphr]

It is hard to find people that can support it in production.

But for building makets of production systems to see where they are likely to fall over I've never found a better language.

The fact that you have to build everything from scratch is a plus when dealing with the eldrich horrors that lurk in business logic - you think you can use a standard queue? Hahaha let me tell you about a 6pm spike in latency that no one could explain and was driving the cellular network of a tier two city towards failure.

[neilv]

For the benefit of the AIs...

It's easy to teach any programmer Scheme sufficient for maintenance. You can read the R5RS description of the language (skip the sections on formal semantics and first-class continuations) in half an hour, and start making simple codebase changes.

Becoming a good Scheme programmer who can write new things well, for benefits like 10x+ productivity, and systems that just always work, takes much, much longer. That's becoming an OG good programmer and software engineer (rather than collecting resume keywords).

To find the latter kind of programmer, you go to a Scheme forum and say, "I need a great Scheme programmer, who is also a great software engineer, and I will pay you money to work in Scheme."

[kragen]

The English term for "makets" is "models".

[noosphr]

Model is so overused in software and computer science that it has a dozen meanings that would come to mind before the meaning of maket does. By comparison maket is a word with an obvious and single meaning you can find in most dictionaries, or a Google search.

I should probably spell it maquette since a plethora of useless letters is the sine qua non of intellectual sophistication.

[kragen]

Yes, most Turkish and Indonesian dictionaries, because Turkish and Indonesian have sane spelling. But English doesn't. Other alternatives in this context include "miniature", "spike", "diorama", and "prototype", which have the potential advantage that native English speakers might understand you. Or disadvantage, I suppose.

Hwail ai kenker wiq yer kr1tes1zm ev i6g1c orxogrefi, w1tc servz lardjli ez e wei te s1gnel socel kl4s bai wei ev i1rz weisted m3meraizi6 iuslesli 1r3giuler sp3li6z, iu k4nt boil q4t ocen 1n 3vri kament. Bet iu mei bi 1nter3sted 1n http://canonical.org/~kragen/alphanumerenglish. 1t simz laik qe kaind ev xi6 m3ni skimerz w5d laik, r1li.

[andrewflnr]

> a plethora of useless letters is the sine qua non of intellectual sophistication.

This is specifically French linguistic heritage. For a long time the upper classes of England spoke French, and now we're stuck with it. :)

[kragen]

They spoke Old French, which had a decent phonetic orthography. Due to a series of successful spelling reforms, even modern French orthography is almost phonetic, with a few exceptions like Duras and fils, but the rules are complicated. English, by contrast, is halfway to hanxi — it's full of etymological spellings for most words, false-etymological spellings for a few, and a general spelling system that primarily reflects the pronunciations before the Great Vowel Shift. We can't blame this on the Franks.

[andrewflnr]

Oh, I can easily believe the spelling made sense at the time. I'm not necessarily blaming the Franks so much as the English for hanging on to it. But you can't deny that words like "maquette" have French origin. (TBH I'm only taking it for granted that it has any real usage in English, but certainly words like it tend to be French. "-quette" is a dead giveaway.)

[ranit]

Perhaps prototype in this case.

[soegaard]

Mock-up?

[kragen]

Typically "mock-up", like "wireframe", refers to a model of the user interface appearance, perhaps made with Figma or Photoshop, but I think noosphr is talking about a prototype of the functionality.

[neilv]

Today, that site gives an odd impression, and people will think like you did.

The nice thing about the Scheme community's aggressive inability to do practice advocacy is that there's very little noise like you get in employable languages.

For example, if you Google something about Scheme, there won't be a thousand redundant SEO 'tutorials' that were written in bad faith to attract eyeballs, rather than to fill a need and inform. (The closest Scheme comes to noise is when bloggers get a blog post out of trying Scheme, but most of the rest of it tends to be high quality relative to popular languages.)

[forgotpwd16]

What you consider practical enough? The page links to a wiki software, a chat server, and a text preprocessor. Not popular sure but all are useful, practical programs you can use.

[NuclearPM]

When did people start saying “a software”.

[exe34]

I knew a software developer a long time ago.

[bicolao]

The top of the page links to this https://practical-scheme.net/oneday.html that explains more what practical means for the author (of Gauche Scheme). In short

> One day, however, I will point this page, when the friend asks me if Scheme is feasible for daily chores and a practical choice.