RE: peasant revolt against DrScheme!

[Greg Pettyjohn <GregP@bsquare.com>]

> On the other hand, I can understand why people who have no interest in
> programming except as a practical tool might balk at learning 
> scheme, which
> is clearly not the most used language in practical contexts.  
> I think the
> long-term solution to this is to have more useful programs 
> that use scheme
> as a scripting language, which will hopefully change the outdated
> perception of scheme as an "academic language".

What is a "scripting language"? I think that the category "scripting
language"
is defined more by it's constituents than by anything else i.e. Perl,
JScript,
VB, Python et al. May I suggest that Scheme is not just a "scripting
language".

The whole notion of a "scripting language" rests on the assumption that the
underlying
functionality has been provided by a layer written in, most likely C. With
this
assumption, there's really no point doing your scripting in Scheme.

OK, let me elaborate:
Who cares that your Scheme script won't crash? The underlying dll *will*
crash,
and so it really doesn't matter how safe Scheme is, your system is still
unstable.

Who cares that your Scheme script has a garbage collector? The underlying
dll was written
in C, so it leaks memory just the same.

Who cares, that Scheme has first class continuations, exceptions, and other
brilliant
control flow abstractions? Your script still only gets one lousy OS process
to live in,
and now you gotta put up with all the marshalling garbage anyway.

So now that I've bombarded you all with annoying riddles, allow me to make a
coherent point:

A programming language defines an implicit abstract opperating system and
the reverse
is also true, an opperating system defines an implicit abstract programming
language.

The "killer app" won't be a scripting application. It will be an application
of
Scheme as a high level OS.