Comments on: Ruby? Scala? Scheme!

By: Andrew W

Andrew W — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:21:44 +0000

There are a lot of really good free texts online including SICP, Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days and TSPLv3.

I, like you, have recently discovered Scheme and have started using it in my job for prototyping web applications. I formerly used Ruby on Rails for this but was always hampered by the lack of integration with Java of which we have lots of legacy code. I’ve been using SISCWeb which is a continuations based web framework that runs on a JVM and can be packaged as a WAR file. Once you’ve got the hang of Scheme – SISCWeb is far quicker than anything else that I’ve used.

So, for me, Scheme has been immediately useful – and I’m presenting the benefits to other groups of developers.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:12:07 +0000

Just a note, Scheme is not purely functional, but definitely a good choice to learn. I do not know Haskell, but from what I have read, it is purely functional.

By: mafr

mafr — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:47:28 +0000

A colleague of mine recommended "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" just the other day so I'll definitely give it a closer look. I generally prefer printed paper, but it's also available online in case someone else is interested.

By: Giorgio Malagutti

Giorgio Malagutti — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:21:40 +0000

Although I agree with you on the analysis I will choose Scala for pragmatic resons.
Scala allows you to have all java libraries at your fingertips and is very likely to have spread IDE integration in 3 months from now.
I want to be able to state that in 8 months from now I have completed a real world project in a new breakthrough language and with Scala I feel that I have a real chance to reach my goal.

By: Andrew McVeigh

Andrew McVeigh — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:02:12 +0000

I spent about 5yrs with scheme as my 2nd language (after C++). It was interesting. The best learning book I found was Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelson and Sussman), a very deep book. One job i did had an exam where they gave me questions out of that book — bizarre. The book is good because it develops the foundations of things like laziness (futures + promises), meta-circularity etc.

Another language/environment that is definitely worth checking out is Oz/Mozart. It’s a multi-paradigm language, but this includes logic variables and functional concepts which makes it fairly unique. Nice tuple syntax also.

Andrew