Re: [Jscheme-user] Re: jscheme.* vs jsint.*

[Toby A. <tob...@pe...>]

On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 06:57:27PM -0400, Timothy John Hickey wrote:
> On May 20, 2004, at 4:53 PM, Toby Allsopp wrote:
> > I must say that after discovering Lisp it's painful to have to write
> > Java.
> 
> I agree, though I actually like the JVM and all of the Java libraries
> and applications. With the new jscheme.JScheme class, I think we can
> easily wrap Jscheme code in a Java class in such a way that noone need
> know it is written in Scheme. You just create a static JScheme
> instance "js" as a private static variable, load in the code, and then
> use js to provide functionality to all of the methods and initializers
> of the class....

Interesting idea, but wouldn't you have to have all your Scheme code in
strings?  I suppose you could ship a .scm file along with the .class,
but then it's a bit of a giveaway that you're using Scheme.

> It might be nice to create a JScheme->Java compiler that produced
> reasonable looking Java code, that would remove some of the
> "management impediments" to using JScheme in the workplace.

Have you seen Linj (http://www.evaluator.pt/downloads/tutorial.html)?
It's not Free, but is free for non-commercial use and aims to solve that
exact problem.

> > I don't have a lot of faith that the software industry will adopt
> > the features that make Lisp great any time soon though.
> 
> Not soon, but I think the movement toward many of the Scheme features
> is inevitable (closures, higher order functions, simplicity in syntax
> and semantics).

I agree about closures and HOFs, but I don't see any movement towards
simple syntax or semantics.  I suppose Java is better than C++ in that
regard, but it's slowly getting worse (generics, new for syntax).

> > Instead people fritter away their time on stuff like Groovy :-(
> 
> I was blissfully unaware of Groovy.....

Sorry to have ruined your day :-)

> > I want to be able to run arbitrary code inside an EJB that is
> > deployed on a running server without having to go through the whole
> > compile-deploy cycle.
> 
> Yes!
> Great idea.
> I use Scheme to write webapps that have that same flavor.  When a
> browser selects a file with the .servlet suffix, the scheme webapp
> reads the scheme code in that servlet, evaluates it in an environment
> containing the request, response, and httpservlet parameters and
> returns the result.
> 
> It makes it very easy to develop servlets, just change the scheme code
> in the .servlet files.... debugging is pretty easy as well as we can
> send the error messages to the browser when in debug mode....

Sounds like JSP, although with the distinct advantage of being Scheme
rather than JSP :-)

Toby.