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Applications Programmer seeks Scheme/Lisp Guidance

1 points by alnayyir ↗ HN
I'm primarily a systems and applications programmer (C and C#) and I've been tinkering around in Dr. Scheme while following along with the SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) from MIT course.

My question is basically this, I've seen the practical common lisp book to see that you can create some (practical?) software that runs within the console, however. As someone who either hacks at a binary level or works on end-user GUI software, where can I apply scheme or Lisp to become more efficient?

I use windows for work and play, so assume a Win32 env. Are there any GUI libraries for Lisp/Scheme under Windows? I'm not asking for 'Ruby shoes' here, in fact, I'd prefer something more powerful, but I'd just like to make use of the power that is inherent to Lisp and Scheme.

7 comments

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aggieben
Check out franz.com for Allegro Common Lisp. It has a native and polished Windows implementation.
alnayyir
non-free :| I don't even mean as in freedom, there's only a limited personal edition.
watmough
Check out the Clojure language. It runs on the JVM under Java 1.5+ SE, so you get cross-platform access to Swing, and to Oracle and SQL Server through the pure Java drivers. It also has great support for concurrency, including STM.

GUI, DB, Cross platform, concurrency. What else could you need?

alnayyir
Sorry, I should've mentioned. I'm very predisposed to avoiding Java in all forms religiously.
watmough
Yes, I've never been greatly enamoured of Java itself, but the JVM truly is a superb piece of work.

Your loss I suppose, but if you want to largely stay in the MS ecosystem, why not check-out F#? It draws heavily from ML/OCAML and is MS supported on .NET and in VS.

F# seems like a safe choice for functional programming in an MS oriented shop.

alnayyir
I'll give it a whirl. Thanks for the heads up.
hs
try newlisp, it works in bsd, linux, osx, xp/98 (i tried)

you may not be able to use the syntax/examples from other lisp/scheme books coz it's a bit different (people say it's a broken lisp)

but it's hell a lot of fun to program in it