Distributed Programming in Scheme

Here are two places to start with distributed programming in Scheme:
Termite
Dimitris Vyzovitis’s patch for revision 8983 (of trunk) in PLT Scheme
Addendum 03/21/08

  • Dimitris’ patch for additional mailbox functionality.

Addendum 04/26/08

Addendum 06/24/08
I’m pretty sure this patch has made it into the main source branch.

BarCamp in Wisconsin

Last year some of my friends and I both attended and presented at Barcamp Milwaukee. When you have a bunch of people coming together to discuss things about which they are really passionate, well, you can’t beat it. It was a lot of fun, I met a lot of wonderful people, and even made some new friends. You can watch a video about that event here.
I just heard the news that BarCamp Madison #2 is getting lined up. Here are the details:
The Home Page
The Google Group

Encript-ing Scheme

Enscript is such a versatile and helpful tool.

Here is how I use it to pretty print Scheme code: 


enscript --landscape --columns=2 --highlight=scheme --borders --line-numbers --output=.ps .ss

Addendum: 03/06/09

Here is the direct link for the GnuWin32 download of Enscript.

Addendum: 03/08/09

Here are my new favorite settings for rendering code with this excellent program: 


enscript --word-wrap --underlay=Underlay --ul-gray=0.9 --line-numbers --
landscape --highlight=scheme --columns=2 --borders --output=test.ps C:\collects\wisdomandwonder\resume\latex-renderer.sls

DrScheme: Insert Lambda Template Keybinding

DrScheme provides a very versatile keybinding system. Out of the box you get bindings that make it very easy to navigate and even refactor your code. One keybinding, insert-lambda-template, works by surrounding the selected code with a lambda function. By default, insert-lambda-template uses the lowercase lambda symbol λ rather than the word lambda. As DrScheme encodes its files in utf-8 it has got no problems with this (in fact DrScheme has shortcuts for inserting most other Greek characters), but if you use other tools to edit or process your source code you may find that they (quite disappointingly) choke on it. For that reason, I wanted to modify the keybinding so that it would use the world lambda rather than the symbol. There are two ways to go about doing this.
The first involves modifying the source code of DrScheme itself. This sounds harder than it is as it doesn’t even involve downloading the source code. When you install DrScheme, it includes a number of source files used to customize itself. If you wanted, you could look up this keybinding, change it, and re-run the setup program. I don’t like this approach, though, since it forces the user to re-build part of the program. That leaves us with the second alternative, a custom keybinding.
A custom keybinding is easy to implement and add. To write it, I copied the definition of insert-lambda-template and changed the lambda symbol to the word lambda. Next, I went through DrScheme’s Edit->Keybindings menu to select Add User-defined Keybinding. That is all it takes.
My keybinding file can be downloaded here.

DrSync: Automatically synchronize file changes in DrScheme v370 and above

DrSync is a plugin that saves your files on frame deactivation and reverts them on frame activation. This tool is of particular interest to folks who run external programs like version control or build related tools on files which they are editing inside of DrScheme.
Continue reading “DrSync: Automatically synchronize file changes in DrScheme v370 and above”