R6RS is an experiment

R6RS is an experiment to address programming language features that people need “in the large”. The keyword in there is “experiment”.

It could fail miserably. It could succeed beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Whatever the case, one of the creative sparks that makes Scheme great is the spirit of innovation. R6RS is trying something very new and innovative in the Scheme community. If it is not the right fit, it will be corrected in R7RS; no harm, no foul.

Liskell

Liskell

is a new syntax frontend for Haskell. Next to its syntax in the form of symbolic expressions — which is also known as Lisp — Liskell also features an extended meta-programming facility. Its aim is to get the best of both worlds: being pure and functional with type inference in the tradition of Haskell, while providing the simplicity and uniformity in its syntax that is necessary for meta-programming.

Lisp Flavoured Erlang

Lisp Flavoured Erlang

is a lisp syntax front-end to the Erlang compiler. Code produced with it is compatible with “normal” Erlang code.

The really big change with this release is that

LFE is now Lisp-2 like Common Lisp, i.e. functions and variables reside in different name spaces, instead being a Lisp-1 like Scheme where they reside in the same name space.

(via PLNews)

Live Coding with Fluxus

Fluxus is a live coding system built on PLT Scheme.

Fluxus reads live audio or OSC network messages which can be used as a source of animation data for realtime performances or installations. Keyboard or mouse input can also be read for games development, and a physics engine is included for realtime simulations of rigid body dynamics.

Fluxus is a very cool system and the maintainer Dave is a very nice guy. Be sure to check it out!
Addendum: 8/14/8
Dave posted some links to videos of fluxus and the no copy paste jam.
(via PLT)

Lovable code

Today I ended up reading a particular post over at Black Grit, Inc. about their CafePress storefront.

Since mzscheme supports unicode, I would’ve done it like this (in R5RS code): 


(define ♥
  (lambda xs
    (begin
      (display "I ♥ ")
      (let loop ((xs xs))
        (display (car xs))
        (if (not (null? (cdr xs)))
            (begin
              (display " ")
              (display "and ")
              (loop (cdr xs))))))))

so that you could write: 


(♥ ’scheme)

Just 3 little words

On my previous project, we had just a bang-up bunch of guys on the team. Everyone was smart, thoughtful, and worked well together: it was ideal. Since there was no revision control system in place when we arrived for the project, we decided to use Subversion. Since I had championed Subversion, I became both the Subversion system and repository administrator.

After a few months, and few thousand commits (a lot of them without any commit messages) I decided to add a commit hook script to prevent commits without comments. To be fair, I figured that no one would mind being required to write commit messages that were as long as they had already been writing, so I wrote a script to get the mean number of words in the commit messages (to date) that were not empty. The average was 7.

7 is a good number, at least enough to convey the “why” with enough brevity to make the RCS helpful. That said, I figured I would be even more accommodating of the users and require only a mere 3 words in every commit message. I made the change, tested it out, and deployed it to the Subversion server.

Eager to view the informative commit messages that would surely result from this new “feature”, the next day I took at look at the first commit message that followed the change:

“#!@& YOU GRANT”

Thanks guys, you gave me my favorite Subversion story.