Why PLT Scheme disllows one-armed ifs

In 1991 I asked Bob Hieb (Kent’s Chez Scheme buddy then, and my co-researcher on theoretical stuff) what the most frequent annoying bug was in the code. He ranked an accidentally omitted else branch among the top three. Indeed, he said that because of this, they had agreed to use WHEN and UNLESS exclusively for cases when they needed a one-armed IF and that they considered all one-armed uses as a bug or a legacy issue (which they corrected as soon as they touched a file).
We have chosen to codify their restriction. It’s a minor inconvenience that buys a good deal of clarity

(via plt)

How To Create a User-Defined Service

Because I always forget how, here is how to create a user-defined service in Windows:

  1. Get a copy of the Windows 2003 Resource Toolkit
  2. Install the service:
    path\INSTSRV.EXE My Service path\SRVANY.EXE
  3. Open the service you just created in regedit here:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\[My Service]
  4. Right click the service itself and create a key named ‘Parameters’. This creates a new sub-folder.
  5. Select the ‘Parameters’ key and then right-click on the space to the right and choose the ‘New Key’ option. Name it ‘Application’.
  6. Its type will default to ‘REG_SZ’. Leave that alone.
  7. For its value enter in the executable path.
  8. You are done.

(via Microsoft Support)

You Might Be Better At Business Than You Think

From this post:

The talk was simple. Come up with a product, charge money for it, make more money than it costs to run it, and you turn a profit! This is the formula that’s been in place since business began. Yet in front of a group of new tech entrepreneurs it seemed like a revelation, a brand new story never told before. [The presenter] said people were coming up to him in droves after the speech thanking him for opening their eyes. Who closed them?

This sounds pretty surprising; isn’t stuff like this covered in the “Business 101” textbook?

Being Scrappy

What does it mean, exactly? It’s basically the diminutive form of belligerent. Someone who’s scrappy manages to be both threatening and undignified at the same time. Which seems to me exactly what one would want to be, in any kind of work. If you’re not threatening, you’re probably not doing anything new, and dignity is merely a sort of plaque.

(via pg)

How Small Can a Scheme Implementation Be?

How small does it have to be? Chibi Scheme does syntax-rules in 174 lines of Scheme, layered over explicit renaming. Indeed, Chibi does essentially all of R5RS in 4822 lines of C + 708 lines of Scheme.

— John Cowan
Scheme 9 from Empty Space is also very small from what Nils said.
(via this thread in r6rs-discuss, I have the email but can not find the archive of it)