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Practical Scheme

(practical-scheme.net)
153 points ufko_org | 5 comments | 21 Oct 25 05:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.638s | source
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zippyman55 ◴[21 Oct 25 07:17 UTC] No.45653293[source]▶
My funny Scheme story. My work place was using it in production, 1999. A ton of code was written by a VERY SMART (and famous) person and of course it worked. He delivered it under pressure, ahead of schedule and it just worked. Ok, but my frustration was that we could not find anyone to support the decoders. So, I could have 300 resumes, and zero would reference scheme. So, there I was one Sunday, a church greeter, greeting people before church on a Sunday. And a fellow greeter brought up software, and I somewhat went off on Scheme as to how difficult it was to find interview candidates for the system. Then, I turn around to greet the next person, and he had a Fricken Scheme Polo Shirt with a prominent Lambda. I am not sure if he heard me.
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1. neilv ◴[21 Oct 25 07:46 UTC] No.45653449[source]▶
Obviously that was divine intervention.

Atheists in 1999 might have to go Usenet comp.lang.scheme to find Scheme experts.

(Scheme polo shirt at church in 1999? My first guess is around Rice University. Second guess is Indiana.)

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2. imglorp ◴[21 Oct 25 14:24 UTC] No.45656222[source]▶
Yale possibly. https://paulgraham.com/thist.html

And of course MIT. https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/archival_object...

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3. DavidSJ ◴[21 Oct 25 16:31 UTC] No.45657824[source]▶
The bearer of that shirt knows that God wrote in Lisp (perhaps Scheme): https://youtu.be/WZCs4Eyalxc
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4. zdragnar ◴[21 Oct 25 16:44 UTC] No.45657975[source]▶
Ostensibly, yes, but it was mostly hacked together with Perl: https://xkcd.com/224/
5. neilv ◴[21 Oct 25 18:01 UTC] No.45659224[source]▶
Scheme was a lot of places in 1999, so I started guessing about concentrations where someone might have had polo shirt schwag made up (e.g., Felleisen's PLT group at Rice, https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~robby/logos/ ) and a lot of churchgoing people (Texas, Indiana, and maybe later BYU/Utah).

I was at MIT in 1999, and class T-shirts occasionally happened, and there were tens of churches within walking distance, for historic reasons, but not a lot of churchgoing people from the universities themselves, that I'm aware of.

But who knows: toplevel works in strange and mysterious ways.

> My work place was using it in production, 1999. A ton of code was written by a VERY SMART (and famous) person and of course it worked. He delivered it under pressure, ahead of schedule and it just worked. Ok, but my frustration was that we could not find anyone to support the decoders.

Actually, except for the "famous" part, that sounds a bit like a major system in Scheme for which I was hired by a very smart person who'd done 10x or 100x development on it. And it just worked, and we could evolve it rapidly, and keep it just working. In 1999, it probably would have been based in New Jersey.