[plt-scheme] Scheme Steering Committee Position Statement

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 10:15 PM, YC<yinso.chen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
[... snip, snip ...]
>
> IMHO the appeal of a small language is not that it's easy to use (on the
> contrary it is harder because you have to write everything from scratch),
> but that it is easy to implement (besides the purity thing) - scheme is one
> language where there are hobby implementations, I've not seen one for Perl,
> Python, C, etc.
>
> For the hobby language implementers, Scheme is wildly successful.
>
[... snip, snip ...]
>
> My 0.1 cent.  Cheers,
> yc

    +1 for a small+large specification. :)

    If I may add my opinion to this small+large vs one big
specification of the language, I would say that indeed if a language
is small (or has a small version, a core let's say), it is more easily
implemented and embeddable (as in "called from another language"), and
thus it could find way in more corners (niches) than otherwise would.

    For example while I was working in a telecom company we did some
Java development, and because Lisp-like languages and interpreters are
easily implemented I was able to create in three days a small
interpreter that allowed us to externalize some business logic that
would have been a pain to write in pure Java.

    So it would have been nice to have a small specification that I
would have been able to say it followed. This would have allowed me to
point my colleagues to existing documentation, tutorials, examples,
etc. Also it would allow some IDEs (like Eclipse) to support such a
"small" language out of the box (or from "supported" plugins).

    Ciprian.