Drinkable Chicken

You know how they say that in order to improve yourself as a programmer, it's a good idea to learn a new language each year? Well, I feel that I haven't been learning much for the last few years. In fact, I've been stagnant for quite a while.

So, maybe I should make a change for 2008, and devote it to learning. The language I chose for this is Scheme. Chicken Scheme, to be precise. (I chose a Lisp language because it's a step up from Python and likely to challenge me in many ways; Scheme because it's clean; and Chicken because it seems to be more of a pragmatic/practical Scheme variant, rather than being focused on theory.)

I tinkered with Chicken before, but I didn't really get very far, possibly because I chose a project that felt like a dead end. But there is much, much to learn. I want to learn about Scheme macros, and continuations, and SRFIs, and object models, and eggs, and interfacing with C code, and many other things. I want to study SICP and EOPL and HTDP. And most importantly, I want to use Scheme much like I use Python now, in a way that produces readable, understandable and maintainable code.

In this blog, I'm hoping to record my progress, talk about things I learned (or that stump me), compare Scheme to other languages (most importantly Python), etc. Hopefully, while I'm at it, I'll also produce some code. :-)

(That said, this blog won't be *exclusively* about my adventures with Scheme...)