[plt-scheme] Fwd: [bayfp] Scheme and FP for our web startup

FYI.  Kawa, yes, but also PLT.

-- Paul

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ethan Herdrick <herdrick at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 6:38 PM
Subject: [bayfp] Scheme and FP for our web startup
To: bayfp at googlegroups.com

 Hi BayFP people,

 We're using FP and we're in the Bay Area (San Jose) so we thought you
 might be interested in hearing about what we're doing.  We're a web
 startup, the Biographicon (www.biographicon.com).  It's a wiki site,
 of biographies, open to all.

 We use Scheme, exclusively, on the back end.  Our implementation of
 choice is Kawa, which as you may know is a Scheme on the Java Virtual
 Machine platform.  Though for internal stuff we've used quite a bit of
 PLT Scheme too.

 You last heard from me when I posted to the list in January about a
 talk I (Ethan) was giving on using Scheme in our startup.  To
 summarize: we use Scheme exclusively on the back end.  Our
 implementation of choice is Kawa, which as you may know is a Scheme on
 the Java Virtual Machine platform.  Though for internal stuff we've
 used quite a bit of PLT Scheme too.

 We're not using a relational database, but instead keeping our data in
 files, structured as s-expressions.  This has been a win, we feel
 though there have been times when exploring data with a language like
 SQL would be nice.  But using Scheme and grep and other shell tools to
 explore the data has been better at other times.

 Naturally, since we use Scheme we aren't a purely functional shop, but
 certainly the large majority of our code is done in a functional
 style.  We always lean towards making things FP, and it wins.

 I hope this is interesting to you.  I also posted on the CUFP list and
 will post on the Lispniks list, too, so if you're tired of getting
 hammered by my posts, I apologize.  We'd love to talk about this stuff
 with you - if you have suggestions or questions, fire away.

 -Ethan Herdrick
 -Daniel Terhorst

 www.biographicon.com - Everyone's biography.