R6RS users don’t seem to have much to say about R7RS. Most R6RS users seem to happy with Scheme and busy using it rather than worrying about how it should be split into two parts (little and big).
R6RS users don’t seem to have much to say about R7RS. Most R6RS users seem to happy with Scheme and busy using it rather than worrying about how it should be split into two parts (little and big).
Hrm… for practical purposes (system scripting, tiny webserver, and especially application extension language) whatever Guile does is what one gigantic subsection of the Scheme community uses. The remainder use whatever Racket does. Its a lot less about the “standard” than it is about the solid, working implementations that have their own communities today. Anyway, we already have a gigantic lisp and a tiny one: CL and Scheme. I don’t think another paring down will seem relevant to actual users unless it is accompanies by a canonical runtime (but it would be hard to make Racketeers and Guilers switch).
The situation would be different if, say, there were a reference implementation with the gravity of, say, CPython. But that’s not the case, and even there the “standard” only matters as far as CPython implements it, and there are still serious IronPython and Jython communities that do their own thing. This whole R7RS thing is sort of… meh.
R7RS may not be everyone’s cup of tea. There wasn’t momentum behind it. That is true.
It is still an expression of creativity, and for that I am grateful that they shared it with the world.
Well, five years have passed, and there are 16 R7RS-small implementations (although the Racket implementation is unofficial, it’s written by a highly respected community member). Guile is catching up too. Other than Sagittarius and Biwa (JavaScript), no new R6RS implementation has been created. Two tranches of R7RS-large have also been published and implementations are beginning to roll in, as portable code is available for all the new libraries. The world isn’t a Guile/Racket duopoly (not that it ever was.)
Thank you for the detailed and thoughtful update John. So glad to hear and
much appreciated.