[plt-scheme] Re: HOWTO: SchemeQL + MySQL on OS X

I'd like to respond to this message which I found in the archives about 
SchemeQL, the high level interface from Scheme to relational databases:

	http://list.cs.brown.edu/pipermail/plt-scheme/2003-October/003791.html

I'd like to give a big thanks to David Herman for sharing his knowledge 
of how to make SchemeQL work with MySQL on OS X.  I followed his 
instructions and I got it to work.

I'd also like to report a bug which I find very disconcerting.  If I 
call SchemeQL's connect-to-database and pass it the name of a database 
which does not exist, it causes the whole PLT Scheme environment to 
crash and die!  I've verified that SrPersist, which SchemeQL uses, does 
*not* crash when you try to connect to a non-existent database, so I 
think the bug must be in SchemeQL itself.

I'd like to tell everyone who works on DrScheme that I think you've 
created a marvelous environment.  It just works correctly and 
intuitively virtually all the time for me.  I especially love the 
cross-platform, native-look-and-feel GUI classes.  I don't think any 
other lisp has that.  And you've done such a great job at creating a 
Scheme interface onto the wxWindows library that I find it much easier 
to use than wxPython which is a similar effort for Python.

I guess the one thing I'd like to see improved in DrScheme would be 
better run time error reporting and debugging.  Sometimes I introduce 
an error and although Dr. Scheme will tell me something's wrong I can't 
glean any useful information from the error message.  As a result, I 
rely on making small changes at a time so when something goes wrong I 
know it's related to whatever I just changed.  If someone were to 
introduce a random error into my large program or if I tried to make 
many changes at once, I think I'd never be able to debug it.

I'd like to close with a recommendation for a great programmer's editor 
which I use with DrScheme.  It's Leo, the programmer's editor and 
outliner, which you can get for free here: http://leo.sourceforge.net/  
Leo lets you write your programs in outline form so that you can hide 
complexity by using hierarchy.  It automatically writes your program 
out in a flat file which can be loaded into traditional tools such as 
DrScheme.  I wouldn't want to program any other way -- Leo + DrScheme 
is the best as far as I'm concerned.  Check it out!

-- Dan