Perhaps the relatively low interest in Scheme is caused by low pay for Scheme programmers in industry.
100$
Maybe the question is: do they exist? At all?
-$100
The arithmetic mean salary of Scheme programmers is undefined because the denominator is zero, and division by zero is undefined.
$3.50
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t. unemployed haskell programmer
Isn't it depressing how one can spend an entire year:
* Reading SICP, The Little Schemer, RnRS documents, SRFIs, etc.
* Implementing Scheme interpreters and compilers.
... and yet end up with no salary increase? At the end of the day, what is the point of Scheme? Is Scheme just an educational toy to prepare one for the real world of Java and C++?
>>9
No. The point of Scheme is a straightforward and practical language. The language that's popularly used in businesses has no bearing about Scheme's practicality.
Scheme is a ... practical language.
Really? Relative to what? Even COBOL was more practical than Scheme can ever hope to be. The label of "practical" belongs to the likes of Java and Python, not to Scheme.
After nearly half a century of being showered with the attention of intelligent people, Scheme still does not have a vibrant portable library ecosystem. There is no portable library for building web applications. Its implementations are still splintered among numerous incompatible mini-dialects. Scheme's long life is a testament to its ability to survive in the educational toy niche. It has yet to move beyond toy status to become a truly practical language on par with Java and Python.
>>11
Scheme is practical because it's a Lisp. Ever since the beginning of Lisp, Lisp programmers have been using Lisp to create domain specific languages by extending the fundamental Lisp implementation. With this kind of power, it was always "trivial" for a single Lisp programmer achieve what a team of programmers (in other languages) would achieve when they wrote a library of functions. In this sense, many Lisp programmers don't feel the need aggrandize their DSL into a public library project and so their DSL remains special and unknown to anybody. I can agree that (Scheme) Lisp code is often "non-portable" because of a mismatch of semantics between implementations. That's an implementation detail that can affect all languages, it is not unique to Scheme (Lisp). I really don't understand the reason why programmers would want to change Scheme implementations when their current one is working as needed. However if it was needed, I'd encourage the programmer to port one Lisp dialect into another dialect because it shouldn't take long to translate the mismatching semantics.
Whatever feature Python and Java has today, it is trivial for Scheme (Lisp) to match it. It's not Scheme's problem that programmers don't care. I'm perfectly happy that Scheme retains its "obscure" state, the important matter for me is that the language retains its mission to be a straightforward and practical language that it has always been from the beginning.
Whatever feature Python and Java has today, it is trivial for Scheme (Lisp) to match it. It's not Scheme's problem that programmers don't care.
That is the Curse of Lisp.
Given the huge supply of Scheme programmers and the low demand, Scheme programming is a minimum wage job with long working hours and no benefits.
I've always thought the most practical applications of scheme are education and language design. It's a bit rare that people use scheme itself outside of open source projects (gimp, geda, etc.)
While others are busy acquiring material comforts in the palace of money, Schemers are leading a monastic existence in the temple of enlightenment.
>>16
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.
We have already greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity, but only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers because much nonproductive activity is required to accompany productive activity. The main causes of this are bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition. Free software will greatly reduce these drains in the area of software production. We must do this, in order for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work for us.
🤖🌟😎
IMPLYING
"Money can't compensate for the ugliness of life." -- Richard Stallman
Enjoy: https://github.com/vichan-devel/vichan/commit/b6d411c5e4f8f7f89d65d3d7ff7446abb61db552