Re: [Jscheme-user] Re: Javadot is like a Usable S2J

[Ken A. <kan...@bb...>]

At 05:34 PM 5/2/2004 -0400, Timothy John Hickey wrote:
>Matthias Felleisen suggests that we call it Scriipt Java since it really can be thought of as a Scripting language
>for Java code.....

I like "Scriipt Java"!  Dyslexic programmers might just think its Java Script. The "ii" might help.

one way of advertising it is that we did the simplest thing we could to make Java scriptable - Scheme is just the most basic essentials of a  programming language.  JScheme is a thin layer on top of java  And it has macro's so you can change the language to make things more scriptable.  

Java programmers think stack traces are a nice feature but an interactive REPL makes the stack trace and Java even more valuable (SmallTalk and Lisp programmers have had this or better for a long time.).

Scripts in other languages, such as the windows .bat shell or bash are not portable (bash scripts are not portable from unix to cygwin unless they are written carefully).  So the quicker you can get into a Java scripting language the more portable you can be.  (I use .bat and bash scripts that are 6 to 9 lines long because once i'm in JScheme, i know i'm safe and can do whatever i want.)

With a Scheme based language you don't need to develop things like ant (a Java make facility) and debate whether or not you should be able to write programs in ant, rather than having to writing them in both Java and XML, which seems doubly awful to me.

Better yet, with Scheme you can pretty much avoid XML, i just use s-expressions, like McCarthy intended.

To me, JScheme is a trade secret. For example, i have a 31 line macro that would be hard to replace in Java, and using it would be much harder in Java.

Our management is concerned that our clients don't want to find out that our most important  code is in JScheme, rather than in Java.  So at one point we had to tell them before they asked.   Now we tell them if they ask.  It might be easier to just tell them we use a scripting Java for where it seems most appropriate.

Much of what i say above should go for SISC as well.  Do SISC applications have any issues with language acceptance?
k