Comments on: Being a software developer

By: Doug Orleans

Doug Orleans — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:33:30 +0000

I haven’t actually used JScheme or SISC, but I’ve used Kawa and it was pretty cool. I imagine they all more or less get the job done, i.e. let you write Scheme programs that can call into Java classes. Actually it’s not hard to hook any Scheme that has a foreign-function interface up to JNI– I remember doing it with Larceny, and I’m pretty sure people have done it with PLT Scheme.

By: Ken

Ken — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 01:17:51 +0000

JScheme? Is that different or better than SISC? Is it cool? I used SICS to prototype some things a couple years ago — dispatch based on parameter types made the prototype come together a lot faster.

I actually do use Jython for some things. I guess I was just thinking of it as Java, though, platform-wise. I wish a Jython with the more recent Python language features was available. It’s hard thinking of Jython as Python without generators… I suppose I was already thinking of “Java” as a platform more than the language, though the vast majority of the code I’ve written for the JVM has been in Java because all of my good JVM-y tools are for Java.

When I finally get around to using .NET for something again, I’m certainly going to check out IronPython. It’s been on the list, but I just haven’t needed to do anything with .NET.

I finally had to learn more JavaScript (er, ECMAScript) when I wanted to write a Firefox extension. That was when I discovered I had been judging JavaScript’s merit based on the sorry implementations of it that were available in browsers long ago. Of course, then I had to, in addition to the project I had in mind, write a MUD client Firefox extension.

By: Doug Orleans

Doug Orleans — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:36:20 +0000

You could use JScheme or Jython or something similar if you want to use Lucene. Java is both a language and a platform, and most Java libraries are more about the platform than the language. (Same goes for .NET, Dot-Scheme, and IronPython.)

Which is why I don’t have an answer to your question– I haven’t learned a new language in ages, because I can use the ones I already know and like (Scheme and Java) with pretty much any technology I’m interested in.

Hm, I guess that’s not entirely true. I’ve been learning (or at least planning to learn more of) ECMAScript so I can do Volity UIs (and AJAX stuff, eventually). But I’m not learning it just for the sake of learning a new language, so I already have a target application to build.

But now I want to make a Scheme interpreter in ECMAScript…