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Comment by _pfxa | Hacker News Reader

I concur, with sorrow. Scheme is such a nice language... I believe a standardised syntax to define compound data structures (aka defstruct) and a standardised C FFI would make Scheme language usable. If these existed, I'd implement a Leiningen-ish tool and a couple libraries for Scheme, to get going with web development.

(There is one more problem I have with Scheme, which is the name. It sounds identical to a vulgar Turkish word for "my penis"; resulting in awkward situations when talking about the language in Turkey, where I live. :))

edit:

  - the Turkish word  
  + a vulgar Turkish word

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>I believe a standardised syntax to define compound data structures (aka defstruct)... would make Scheme language usable.

Isn't this what SFRI 9 is?

http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-9/srfi-9.html

Are you sure you pronounce Scheme correctly?

Click the speaker button on the bottom left of the text box to listen:

http://translate.google.com/#en/fr/scheme http://translate.google.com/#tr/fr/sikim

They have distinctly different pronunciations.

We need a web-service that checks any word for any similarities to obscene words in languages of the worlds! Though I suspect that a lot of words may be such words.

:-)

Do you say Sch-eme or Sk-eme? I think both are ok, but please correct me if you are a native english speaker.

Sk-eme, as in school, or scam, not as in schweppes, or Schrödinger. I'm not a native speaker, yet quite practised. And Sk-eme is how most pronounce the name, as far as I've seen. You can't know how much I wish it was called plan, plot or something :)

I'm pretty sure only /skiːm/ (as in skill) is correct.

a very potent language :D

I can only call it Lisp in public. Otherwise, Turkish translation of "I'm using Scheme to build this application" sounds identical to "I'm using my penis to build this application". I said the sentence at lunch in my last job, and boy, albeit we're all devs, it was awkward.

I tried to search it out of curiosity but google wasn't helpful. Could you please tell us how to spelled or point to a reference?

The Turkish word? Sure, it is spelled as sikim, where sik [1] is the (quite vulgar) word for penis (noun, when used as verb, means to f.ck), and (i)m is the possessive affix [2]. The letter i is always pronounced like the first i in victim, and the word is pronounced like si-kim. The perception of the phrase is similar to that of my cock, rather than my penis.

One might think that the similarity is so vague, that wouldn't pose a problem to speak it out loud. I, personally never recognised the similarity, until I spoke the word out loud.

[1] http://www.turkishdictionary.net/?word=sik

[2] Turkish is slightly similar to Latin.

edit: add a newline between footnotes

The language/proof assistant coq has similar problems (damn frenchies getting their revenge).

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