[plt-scheme] Science Collection

On Oct 4, 2004, at 1:11 PM, Gene Sullivan wrote:

> If you either don't want to foster diversity or
> specifically wish to favor PLT scheme over other
> implementations of an already outnumbered language
> (EG Scheme vis-a-vis C++, Java, etc.) then feel
> free to ignore this `advice'.
>
> sincerely,
>   Scheming Gene

I must admit that I find this kind of advice thoroughly misplaced. One 
thing that we, the CS community have learned over the past two decades, 
is that implementations matter not language specs. That's why PERL won 
and SCHEME lost.

As Eli points, r5rs is an impractical language. Sure you can write 
programs in it that do something useful, but you could have done this 
in COBOL and I did so. Similarly, SLIB is not a practical library 
system.

As Doug says in his reply, he thought about this decision and most 
people do, but in this day and age there is not much choice. Instead of 
implicitly criticizing contributors who write/port well-designed 
libraries for a widely used Scheme, we should thank them on our knees 
that they haven't given up on a lost language yet.

In that spirit, thanks Doug for contributing to a practical Scheme -- 
Matthias