Robby Findler wrote: > On 5/25/07, Thomas Lord <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Had Scheme been liberalized in the direction >> of FEXPRs and first class environments a few years back, by now, >> there'd be a lot of interesting R&D in on-line incremental compilation >> of Scheme. > > That seems extremely unlikely to me. Anything that doesn't at least > have some connection to the typed orthodoxy is already essentially > impossible to get published these days (a recent submission to ICFP on > macros got a 10 out of 10 from one reviewer but was still rejected). > > My guess is that what you suggest would have likely made Scheme even > less relevant to the PL research community than it currently is.
If I understand correctly, you are basically explaining why "impossible to get published" is an increasingly irrelevant metric. Surely, if Scheme had all of those more dynamic, more general features -- any already-published paper could be updated to include just a few words saying "We consider a subset of Scheme in which...." Now, if the publication refereeing process gives different results just because of that, then it is the publication system, not the programming language, that is broken. However, I think that the presence of those more dynamic, more general features would have a beneficial effect in changing the direction of programming language research. Here is some handwaving as to why: Some years back, you recall, Self was pretty hot stuff in PL research. At the periphery of "things like self" there was even systems-programming relevance of incremental, on-demand compilation in the form of hacks such as the synthesis kernel. That stuff was hard, back then and still, and so investment in those directions dried up pretty much. Following the worse-is-better pattern, the high-level result of having those features -- a prototype-based object system -- got realized again and again and again in Perl, Python, Lua, Ruby, Javascript, and more. We have empirical evidence that programming languages with that kind of object system have very good survival characteristics. And now, in the real world, we're entering a period when commerce is going to drive innovation in the implementation of such systems where Scheme could have been driving that very same research for years, by now. If Scheme had those features, Scheme implementations might easily have wound up as early contenders in the scripting language wars, and/or as Javascript engines. This would have fed back into research opportunities. > > For example, a look at the literature suggests that one notable > Schemer might have left for greener pastures had fexprs been in Scheme > for any length of time: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/wand98theory.html. > (Or maybe he might have just taken up the challenge for the joy of the > hunt .... Mitch?) > Interesting. -t > Robby > _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list r6rs-discuss@lists.r6rs.org http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
