RE: scsh in PLT Scheme?

["Neil W. Van Dyke" <nwv@neilvandyke.org>]

> Remember, in the commercial world, the name of the game is programmer
> productivity.

I can't speak for the PLT developers, but speaking as one beneficiary of
their efforts, my primary interests in PLT Scheme are:

  1. Research prototyping, involving heavy use of Internet (using truly
     open standards, not commercial lock-in plays) and some language
     design (which is a big reason for using Scheme or Lisp).

  2. (Thinking ahead a couple years) Platform for teaching fundamentals
     of CS, software engineering, and communityware to undergrads.

It would be good to offer graduating CS students a crash course in any
of the latest employability buzzwords that the curriculum might not have
covered incidentally (e.g., Oracle, Java, ".NET"), since buzzwords often
help get a new-college-grad's foot in the door of their first job.
Where they proceed to demonstrate their 37% smarterness.

However, I don't necessarily need those buzzwords for my research
prototyping, nor for providing compelling and relevant constructivist
applications for students to build, nor for establishing a reputation
for producing excellent graduates.

And, selfishly, I actually rather like the idea of dialogue in the
Scheme community being somewhat insulated from the intellectual
necrophilia of IT middleware adoption cycles.

Cheers,

Neil

-- 
                                                        Neil W. Van Dyke
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/