from Hacker News

Scheme in the browser: A Hoot of a tale

by nickmain on 10/10/23, 3:23 PM with 19 comments

• by tannhaeuser on 10/10/23, 8:01 PM

  I'm personally not a fan, but still am hesitating to point out that Scheme was, in fact, chosen as the language for styling and transforming SGML (DSSSL, still available as OpenJade), and I believe also Brendan Eich's first choice, presumably because of the DSSSL precedent. But then supposedly his bosses told him it has to be more like Java, at least in name.

  I'm not a big believer in syntax (and think LISPy language will always remain niche, which is part of its appeal), but one thing I'd imagine is that LISP/Scheme could've helped to prevent the syntax excess that is CSS, simply because there were already plausible styling examples for eg. classic stateful recto/verso print formatting, and LISP's homoiconicity would've make CSS syntax look kindof gross.

• by iainctduncan on 10/11/23, 1:00 AM

  Awesome! I am using s7 Scheme in WASM as an interpreter, and it's a blast. Very excited to see this.

  For anyone interested, here's how easy it is to use s7 (which is implemented as one big ANSI C file) in WASM. https://github.com/iainctduncan/s7-wasm

  And a more comprehensive example: https://github.com/actondev/s7-playground

• by beepbooptheory on 10/10/23, 7:31 PM

  Unreasonably excited about this. Seems like such an incredible team with the right kind of goals, doing something novel and cool for, it seems, me personally.

• by schemescape on 10/10/23, 8:27 PM

  Are there specific Guile code bases that are motivating this work?

• by cpill on 10/10/23, 8:59 PM

  this layout is terrible on a phone