[plt-scheme] Scheme Steering Committee Position Statement

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 8:35 PM, Karl Winterling<kwinterling at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's probably impossible to get all
> implementations to agree on a ``standard way'' to define structs, for
> example.

If you can't standardise such a basic thing, what exactly is the point
of a standard? This is the bit I don't get about the "small language"
argument. If you're going to define a standard so anemic that all
practical implementations are forced to implement multiple
incompatible features, what exactly does a standard get you? Any
moderate sized program won't be portable under this standard (and this
is exactly the situation with R5RS) so why bother?

Scheme suffers from too many talented programmers reimplementing the
same stuff in their own pet implementation. We need fewer
implementations not more. That situation doesn't seem to hurt, e.g.,
Haskell.

N.