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Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

Zak, why does it matter to you if someone is using Scheme in the real world? The question you should be asking is if you can use it to your advantage to outperform others who aren't using it.

So far, the biggest issue with Common Lisp I ran into while writing Weblocks is lack of continuations. There were other issues but they were minor annoyances that were fairly easy to overcome. Right now I'm working on a delimited continuations library for CL. Writing one really isn't as bad as it sounds - I think On Lisp unnecessarily scares people from rolling their own code walker.

Out of curiosity, other than continuations, what advantage do you see in using Scheme over CL?

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I really hate it when someone answers a question with "your question doesn't matter. What you should be asking is [whatever I think you should be asking] "

I assume the person asking the question has good reasons for asking it. If I can I answer. If not, I don't.

Coming to the question proper, there are often good reasons to ask if other people use / don't use a particular technology.

To answer, I use a custom variant of scheme to write machine- learning systems on a cluster of cots machines. It compiles down to optimized C, but I write in scheme.

A big part of it is the fact that Scheme is simple and Common Lisp is not. This is a "soft" feature, but I think it's important. I want to try out Scheme and see if it feels better.

I ask because I'd like to get a perspective on the tools that are available from people who actually make things with them. The programming language I use might be a "secret weapon" in some situations, but most of the people it would give me an advantage over wouldn't even understand why it's an advantage.

The problem I had with Scheme was that it doesn't stay simple. The core is certainly more elegant than Common Lisp's, but all the cruft has a nasty way of sneaking back in through SRFIs and big hairy macros.

I think continuations is an advantage if you don't use ajax. When you use Ajax, continuations in a web framework aren't needed. This has been my experience with the last two web applications I've written using CL and UCW.

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