Drinkable Chicken

So, I’ve been learning (Chicken) Scheme for over a month now. Let’s look back.

• I’m currently hacking on two projects in Chicken; one is a translation of an existing Python program, the other is something written from scratch. Neither will be very large. If they become somewhat useful/usable, I will probably make them available.

• I’m using vim, but looking for an editor that gets along better with Scheme (in terms of autoindent etc… I don’t like scheme.vim too much). Of course Emacs would be an obvious candidate, but I’m reluctant because of several reasons. (Less than stellar OS X support, unwillingness to learn many new keybindings and/or beat the editor into doing what I want, unwillingness to learn elisp at this point.)

• Even though succinctness is power, so far my Scheme code is almost twice as long as equivalent Python code. ¹) I’m not yet drawing any conclusions based on this; there are many possible explanations, like the fact that I am still learning and therefore tend to use more verbose code (for clarity, or simply because I don’t know a shorter idiom), while my Python code does not suffer from the same problem. So, we’ll just have to see if this changes over time.

• On the other hand, my Scheme code seems to be cleaner than the Python I had. Scheme really encourages rigorously splitting up code into smaller functions. (This is probably true for most, if not all, functional languages, by the way.)

• Chicken has been a joy to program in. It has a lot of useful functions out of the box. I do find that you don’t get very far if you only have vague ideas about what your code should do. :-) Functional languages seem to have this feature (?) more than, for example, Python or Ruby.

• I am impressed with the availability of Chicken libraries (eggs) so far. Granted, I haven’t needed very complex stuff so far (testing framework, command line argument parsing, etc), but what I did need was there, often in several flavors. Installation is stupid easy too.

When my initial projects are done, I plan to look at stuff that is a little more “real world”, like game development (using SDL?), OS X hacking, maybe web programming. (I also would like to contribute an egg at some point — but I need to write useful code first! :-)

¹) I’m just looking at file sizes here. Maybe I’ll do a more meaningful comparison later, when I have more code to compare.