Scheme community frowns upon mutating code. R6RS even forced that by default, though the rest of the specification was a mess.
So, scheme style these days is all about pure functions, tail calls and continuations. To think about it, that really is setting it apart from common lisp.
My definition of an FFI was simply about fully supporting native threads. Simplifying FFI definitions has not been a big deal for me. It is either a few hours of work, or if more than that, then I simply use Swig.
I agree on the speed part. But guile 2 is getting better. The reason guile cannot be as blazing fast as say gambitc is their need to inter-operate with all sorts of C code. Native threading included.
Guile does it better. You can use shared memory threads in guile without any penalty. Atmost you have to allow for the garbage collector to run when inside FFI functions. But that is a small price to pay in case you need to use multiple parallel-concurrent threads with a single heap.
Guile was built with FFI in mind and has an impressive history. Just take a look at guile gnome bindings.
> Speed and Simplicity
Guile 2 is extremely fast. Not as fast as LuaJIT, but it no reason it won't get there. As for simplicity, take a look at the partial evaluator in trunk of guile 2.
> Education
Guile is good old scheme.
> Functional
Can't get more functional than scheme :)
> Everything is a Table
Well, almost everything is a pair in guile. Vectors and hash-tables are trivially available. Though I recommend to sticking to functional programming in scheme style.
> Consistent
As before, can't get more consistent than scheme.
> Portable
Guile is available on n900. So there.
To continue, guile has continuations (delimited or otherwise), and macros (hygienic or otherwise), both of which are effectively missing in lua.
And guile offers all of this while supporting native threading with a single heap. Sweeet.
> I respectfully submit that the man who thought AWT was an acceptable GUI toolkit doesn't have a leg to stand on here.
Where did Gosling say that? I remember reading that AWT was a botched job because they had very little time to ship out a UI toolkit. They replaced it with Swing later.
And if you think Swing also sucks, then try developing swing apps in groovy. Java language sucks even in SWT UIs.
Microsoft had run huge ads on how LSE was using .NET and Windows in critical financial applications. Within a year LSE had suffered crashes in the same critical areas.
Much of high performance modern VMs (not just JVM) are built on Self project and StrongTalk acquisiotion by Sun. I think Oracle would have quite a few key patents due to this.
Though the Visual works contribution to VM technology cannot be discounted. And it is owned by IBM. So probably IBM and Oracle will not use these patents against each other.
I had the same impression. Nothing can educate like a good teacher who coaches you directly. Looks like many americans (or britons) are not getting this individual attention in their schools and colleges.
Some professors are able to teach you complex things in such simple terms that it damn well blows you away. I remember being tought van der walls equation's proof using some very basic concepts and the taylor series. I can't find that simple a proof on wikipedia now, and unfortunately I have forgotten much of physics. SICP is also a good example of a good teacher making complex problems simple.
I have never used gentoo. Does gentoo patch packages as much as Debian? Or is their build process sophisticated to allow parallel install of multiple versions of say postgresql?
> I just don't want to see some zealot telling me I can't have a car, and that I am some sort of evil person for having one.
Not everybody thinks about you when choosing the people they want to live with. You argue like a conservative asshole berating a bunch of hippies for choosing their own way of life.
> What I'm saying : there should be no laws against this type of thing, and no laws saying you should do it. Entirely personal choice all round.
That is entirely upto the people living in those subuebs. If they decide that you should drive your car around rather than through their suburb, then I don't see how it violates your personal freedom. Next you will be bitching about congestion charges.
I can't find that story online, but it has a similar ending vis-a-vis the alien's decision.