> On Mar 26, 2019, at 10:51 AM, 'Joel Dueck' via Racket Users
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> This is a blog post / discussion that seems like it could use a little
> clarity and evangelism from the Racket world:
>
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19481789
>
> I’m struggling to understand exactly what problem the blogger sees with
> "little" languages.
The title is a bit ambiguous, at least for people who have been around long
enough.
The term “Little Language” is due to Bentley and means something like a small
programming language (usually general-purpose and equivalent to LC/TM) useful
in a specific domain. He mentioned AWK at the time and proposed that people
should write more of those. And people did.
There are also small general-purpose languages as in their definitions
(grammar, explanation of semantics, etc) are short in terms of say pages. The
Blog post calls those Little Languages too and indeed that’s what the blog post
is about.
In a sense. the author of the blog post is re-arguing the case for moving from
R5RS to R6RS. (As in making a language standard large enough so that it is
truly useful and only serious compiler writers translate the standard into an
implementation.) The argument produced a backlash and helped us recognize that
Racket had moved beyond Scheme. It might be best if we don’t push too hard on
this blog post.
— Matthias
p.s. FWIW, there are counter-arguments to the R6RS move. Lua is a good example
of a small gp language that is successful and is kept intentionally small so
that each project in need of an extension language can implement it and add it.
Somehow Roberto has managed to not make this a problem in porting code from one
Lua to another.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Racket Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
