Erlang looks cool and I like that Joe Armstrong's book, "Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World", has client/server examples. I'll see if I can post updates on what I learn, though I get distracted easily. I thought Drupal would be a good topic of conversation, but I never said much about it since I found that I have little interest in learning PHP. I also thought that Qt was an interesting development environment. I may get back to Qt someday soon, but I was caught up in seeing what the Scheme programming language can do.
I spent some time learning Scheme over the past few months.I read, Kent Dibvig's "The Scheme Programming Language" and before that "The Little Schemer" by Friedman and Felleisen. I think I've been bothered by a lack of compelling examples on what can be done - where are the libraries? I want to know what libraries are available, how to read/write/parse files in the language and how to pass data between or among various host computers. I think that the implementations are getting fractured among R5RS, R6RS and PLT-Scheme's own movement toward a Scheme dialect they call Racket (http://www.plt-racket.org). That said, Scheme was my first experience with a functional programming language. That alone was worth the time spent. It's re-opened my mind to programming abstractions I haven't thought about since I learned APL in high school.
Oh, "The Little Schemer" - it has to be the most fun programming language book ever written. It has lots of examples and asks lots of questions like "What does this do?", "Here's one solution, can you think of something better?", all in a light-hearted fashion. It really gets you thinking about the language.
Douglas,
ReplyDeleteGawk (the Gnu version of awk) is available for windows at
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gawk.htm
(from your comment on http://gregable.com/2010/09/why-you-should-know-just-little-awk.html)
Argh! I was expecting you to talk about Erlang and you warped over to scheme before saying anything.
ReplyDeletePeople learn scheme in school and promptly forget it afterwards. Scheme is a great language for learning functional programming but I don't think anyone actually uses scheme in real life. (Well, maybe a few people, but not many.) If you are interested in scheme you may want to checkout clojure. It is lisp/scheme like, runs on the jvm, and seems to have a pretty active community. (There are lots of libraries being developed.)
My first exposure to scheme was when I read "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" about 20 years ago. Great book, nice language.