The Revival of Medley/Interlisp

Re:The Revival of Medley/Interlisp by worthless-trash on Thursday November 23, 2023 @08:37PM (#38399858)

> Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.

Common lisp isn't that big of a moving target, its also a standard which means that the standard isnt moving. In the vehicular comparison, I'd say its more like the filliping geepney (big heavy, shiny and bullies it way through heavy traffic).

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Re:The Revival of Medley/Interlisp by 7thaccount on Thursday November 23, 2023 @09:45PM (#38400185)

The Conrad Barski lisp book used pictures of sheep and wolves to describe Scheme, Lisp, and Haskell iirc. Also cavemen to describe Fortran I think lol. I think he was trying to show scheme as being more elegant than common lisp, but also significantly less practical.

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Re:The Revival of Medley/Interlisp by vincent-manis on Thursday November 23, 2023 @11:33PM (#38400658)

I would be able to speak to the allegedly “impractical” nature of Scheme if only I knew why Cisco hired Kent Dybvig, the principal developer of Chez Scheme. I would also like to know why Beckman Coulter Life Sciences supported the development of Swish, an extension of Chez Scheme that provides Erlang-inspired message passing.

Gambit and Scheme have been used for health applications. Here's one paper on that subject, from 2013: https://ecem.ece.ubc.ca/~cpetersen/lambdanative_icfp13.pdf

I would mention the use of GNU Guile to build Guix, which has had considerable uptake. Guile has been used to build other Linux programs.

Admittedly, Scheme isn't widely used. But impractical? No!

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Re:The Revival of Medley/Interlisp by varjag on Friday November 24, 2023 @03:11AM (#38401646)

…if only I knew why Cisco hired Kent Dybvig…

Nobody knows really but my suspicion it's not for moving Cisco codebase to Scheme.

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Re:The Revival of Medley/Interlisp by lispm on Friday November 24, 2023 @03:50AM (#38401853)

The impression of being 'impractical' came from the Scheme reports, which for a long time, with the exception of the controversial R6RS, only standardized a relatively simple/limited language (example: no error handling).

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Re:The Revival of Medley/Interlisp by 7thaccount on Friday November 24, 2023 @11:36AM (#38405669)

Probably impracticality via ecosystem. Chez scheme is fast, but more limited library wise than common lisp and much more limited than Python in that manner. Note that I like Chez scheme and think it's really cool.

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Re:The Revival of Medley/Interlisp by MattHeffron on Friday November 24, 2023 @09:09PM (#38410499)

why Beckman Coulter Life Sciences supported the development of Swish, an extension of Chez Scheme

Having worked at Beckman¹ from 1978-2022, I strongly suspect that the support of a Scheme-based system was due to the educational background of several of the senior developers in that group of the Life Sciences software development team.

¹ Beckman Instruments -> SmithKline Beckman -> Beckman Instruments -> Beckman Coulter -> Beckman Coulter acquired by Danaher 2011 -> Beckman Coulter Capillary Electrophoresis business moved (2013) to AB Sciex (also a Danaher company)

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Re:The Revival of Medley/Interlisp by packetlost on Thursday November 23, 2023 @09:49PM (#38400210)

I feel like Racket sorta changed the "practicality" story in many respects for Scheme. Not in the sense that Racket itself is practical, but the macro system is really good and inspired other Schemes like Gerbil that are more practical.

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