> From: "Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen" <xxxxxx@nieper-wisskirchen.de>
> Date: Friday, September 11, 2020 9:47 AM
>
> Am Fr., 11. Sept. 2020 um 16:31 Uhr schrieb <xxxxxx@ancell-ent.com>:
>
>>> [...] The unfortunate thing with Scheme is the dearth of actively
>>> developed applications. Apps are needed to put library designs to
>>> the test.
>>
>> This is actually a very, *very* bad sign about the state of the Scheme
>> world.  One I'm planning on addressing at least a bit, but Real Life
>> is hitting me very hard for the foreseeable future.
>
> We have probably more implementations of Scheme than applications
> written in Scheme. :) But even with so many implementations, the
> competition with other languages is hard because there is usually more
> money to maintain high-quality implementations of those languages.
> (Another reason why it was very costly to the RNRS process to, well,
> alienate Chez and Racket.)

That was inevitable due to the near total rejection of R6RS by the
existing long term Scheme community (check the balloting, not to
mention how very few existing implementations made the switch).

As for Chez, perhaps I'm missing some vital history, but the dates
would seem to argue another story:

2007: R6RS ratification, including a yes vote by R. Kent Dybvig,
  resulting in Chez moving to it.
2011: Cadence Research Systems bought by Cisco, Chez becomes
  unobtainium outside of Cisco.
2013: R7RS ratification
2016: Cisco makes Chez open source (was that promised beforehand???)

Among other things, Racket's current envisioned path of ditching
S-expressions for an infix syntax suggests, absent a fork that long
term collaboration was never in the cards.  But I don't know enough
about it, I never found it or its predecessors interesting.

Still, every bit of this hurt the Scheme community.  But I suppose I'm
a fan of lost causes, having lived through the 1980s AI Winter which
blamed mainline LISP for higher level corporate technology, marketing,
etc. failures.

We probably wouldn't even be here if not for Paul Graham's ViaWeb
success using LISP, and his promotion of LISP based on that starting
around 2001, an excellent time due to the "dot.com crash"¹ which made
it a lot more important to:

a) deliver real stuff (no more IPOs for an idea)

b) be able to deliver real stuff (as he and many others noted,
technical failure was a common pattern in the frothy dot.com bubble)

c) be able to do this cheaply, since getting money for the first
stages of startups became a lot harder, and for all but unicorns
the IPO window closed in 2002, had a nice run in the US from the
late 1950s (think DEC) to SarbOx.

¹ It was much more a communications crash, something I had a
ring side seat for while working for Lucent as it went from 106,000
employees (with that many Oracle seats!) to a planned 35,000 in the
single year of 2001.

> [ Marc agrees that library versioning is HARD ]

Although maybe something can be done about record type disjointness???

- Harold