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More on Scheme

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Based on my inbox, my Scheme is Love piece has gotten a lot of people interested in Scheme and Lisp.
 
Here's the best way to get started:
 
  1. Install DrScheme. I use the Windows version, and it's great.
  2. Read R5RS. Frankly, one of the things that makes Scheme great (in my mind at least) is the clarity of R5RS.
  3. Buy a copy of The Scheme Programming Language by Kent Dybvig.  You can read it online here, but I'm a big fan of printed books.  I found that between TSPL/3e and R5RS, I was able to become pretty proficient pretty fast.
  4. I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend SICP, which is also available online. It's less about learning Scheme and more about learning a new way to think. Either way, it's a purple pill everyone should swallow at some point in their lives.
  5. Finally, spend some time reading stuff listed at readscheme.org. It's a great bibliography site that makes it easy to get into this space.  I had my call/cc epiphany while reading papers listed there - you will too.
 
Finally, I found Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp to be an excellent companion to see how the other half lives.  There are no shortage of bad Lisp books - this one was a real gem.
Posted Sep 25 2005, 06:49 PM by don-box

Comments

Tayssir John Gabbour wrote re: More on Scheme
on 09-25-2005 2:34 PM
(I hope HTML is enabled...)

If you really like Scheme, here are some free video lectures: <a href="http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/">Abelson/Sussman</a> and <a href="http://www.aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw">ADUni</a>

Also, a favorite Common Lisp book is <a href="http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/">Practical Common Lisp</a>, a very modern treatment of Common Lisp.
Tayssir John Gabbour wrote re: More on Scheme
on 09-25-2005 2:35 PM
Ok, the links to the videos are:
http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/
http://www.aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw

Practical Common Lisp:
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
Javier G. Lozano wrote re: More on Scheme
on 09-25-2005 4:54 PM
Hi Don,

For our programming language course at Iowa State (http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~cs342) we used the following Scheme text resource:
http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/r5rs_toc.html

For our interpreter we used Chez Scheme:
http://www.scheme.com/chezscheme.html

What I'm looking for is a good .NET port for Scheme. Know of any?
Barry Perryman wrote re: More on Scheme
on 09-26-2005 2:39 AM
Hi Don,

In addition to the good suggestions already, some more very good lisp books:

Paradigms of AI Programming, Peter Norvig.

This offers a guided history tour of AI, with lisp as the language of choice - although you also end up also implementing prolog to solve some logic programming problems, and a scheme interpreter/compiler to see how lisp is implemented in lisp.

On Lisp, Paul Graham.

This book covers macros in great depth, and uses them to implement some very interesting features. The book is hard to get hold of in a dead tree version, Amazon has one used copy for ~ $175, but you can download the PDF (minus a couple of illustrations that got lost) here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
Aarthi wrote re: More on Scheme
on 09-26-2005 10:30 AM
"Teach yourself Scheme in fixnum days" by Dorai Sitaram is also a good read if you need to brush up Scheme concepts real quick. The PDF link for the ebook is here - www.cs.virginia.edu/~cwm2n/cs655/t-y-scheme.pdf
Ted Leung on the air wrote Fresh Lisp/Scheme quotes
on 09-27-2005 1:53 AM
Don Box said "Scheme is Love", and supplied a nice reference list. In the OSAF IRC, PJE said "I'm beginning to believe that there is No Language But Lisp, and Python Is Its Prohpet. :)"
Blair wrote re: More on Scheme
on 09-27-2005 9:13 AM
Go take a look at Scheme.NET at: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jgrinbla/

Olivier Drolet wrote re: More on Scheme
on 09-27-2005 1:46 PM
Since Lisp is admitedly cool, perhaps it might be possible for you to convince the powers that be at Microsoft to make the CLR friendlier wrt, say, Common Lisp and Scheme? The .NETification of Common Lisp appears to be currently quite penalizing.
Diego Vega wrote re: More on Scheme
on 09-28-2005 10:11 AM
I wish my Lisp teacher at college could see all this. She was always so bitter about nobody really appreciating Lisp or Scheme.
Peter de Laat wrote re: More on Scheme
on 09-29-2005 12:30 AM
A fun way to play around with Scheme using Visual Studio is to use Ken Rawlings Tachy. http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2005/08/12/new-tachy-release/

"Tachy is a Scheme-like (R5RS is the template, but not the goal) language that is being developed in C# for the .NET framework "

I recently made a Visual Studio extension to be able to debug Scheme programs with VS. Ken has included that in the current version of Tachy.



XSLT:Blog[@author = 'M. David Peterson']/Main wrote 'Scheme is Love' [via MSDN and Don Box]
on 10-01-2005 1:53 PM
{ End Bracket }: Scheme Is Love -- MSDN Magazine, October 2005 If you have ever experienced Don Box live and in person you'll know what I mean when I say you could very well be in for a real treat. For example, in this picture he has taken a kinda-sorta rendition of "It's the end of the world as...
Dave Pawson. wrote re: More on Scheme
on 10-03-2005 8:48 AM
<grin/> Who said we don't like round brackets!!!
Scheme is fun and fits the magic formulea.
Easy to do easy things .....

Surprising the number of schemers that came out
of the closet!


regards DaveP

Pity you had to exclude the visually impaired Don.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-turingtest-20031105/

Rob Blackwell wrote re: More on Scheme
on 10-05-2005 9:58 AM
Readers may also be interested in my project "L Sharp" which is a LISP dialect for the .NET platform. www.lsharp.org

franklinmint.fm wrote it's theoretically possible to actually conform without intending to and without a commitment to continuing to be that way on an ongoing basis...
on 10-06-2005 7:07 PM
Don Box: "one of the things that makes Scheme great (in my mind at least) is the clarity of R5RS.'...
Edi Weitz wrote re: More on Scheme
on 10-08-2005 6:45 AM
I fully agree with Olivier Drolet's posting - it'd be nice if upcoming releases of the CLR would add features that make it possible to implement (Common) Lisp /efficiently/ on top of it.

And while I'm at it let me misuse this forum for a shameless plug for my CL/.NET integration layer "RDNZL" - click on my name to check it out.
Mark Hurd wrote re: More on Scheme
on 10-12-2005 6:10 PM
For completeness, I mention DotLisp here too.

http://dotlisp.sourceforge.net/

It is rather stable and quite useful, especially with my patches, but probably not the best Lisp dialect for someone new to Lisp.
TheChaseMan's Frenetic SoapBox wrote Reflections on Programming Languages
on 10-20-2005 6:11 PM
XSLT:Blog[@author = 'M. David Peterson']/Main wrote Is The Agile Development Community Barking At The Wrong &quot;Big Dog On Campus&quot;?
on 11-22-2005 11:03 PM
Scott Bellware [MVP] : Microsoft Takes it on the Chin Over Test-Driven Development On Test-Driven Development and Agile, Microsoft seems to have has lost its way, lost its courage, and lost its ability to innovate. The exodus of Microsoft’s brain trust is just one facet of the current sorry state of affairs of the occupation of its once fertile territories...
XSLT:Blog[@author = 'M. David Peterson']/Main wrote Is The Agile Development Community Barking At The Wrong &quot;Big Dog On Campus&quot;?
on 11-23-2005 3:25 AM
[UPDATE: OK, this graphic speaks VOLUMES: So does this entry(where this graphic was pointed out... click the image to view the article that it came from) where you can also find the following two comments: Scott Bellware(contains lots of references to other bloggers and what they had to say): "Rather than shape up Visual Studio to be amenable to Test-Driven...
Wade Hatler wrote re: More on Scheme
on 05-23-2006 9:02 AM
This question is a bit tangential, but have any of the people here who are obviously knowlagable about the different paradigms tried out F#, (Microsoft Research's .NET implimentation of ML/OCAML)? How does it compare in usefulness to Scheme or LISP? Does it appear to be a good intermediate step between C# and LISP/SCHEME?

It looks like it will give a lot of the benefits of LISP/SCHEME, but better integration with the .NET framework, which is extremely important to me.

Thanks

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