Re: [Chicken-hackers] why Chicken?

[Graham Fawcett]

On 1/31/07, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
> But again the question is why *Chicken* ?  These specs could describe a
> lot of projects, whether languages or tools.  Not as many projects as
> one might hope.  I think the fact that Chicken is basically a good
> project, is unusual and important.  I know that's a big part of why I've
> stuck around this long.  But the question remains, why *Chicken* ?

For me, Brandon, the excellent FFI is a big win. If you need the
functionality of some library XYZ, and it's not in the eggs-list, it's
usually trivial to write a wrapper for it. As a general-purpose
application developer, Chicken's lack of third-party libraries
(compared, say, to Python, Perl, Java) would make it a non-starter,
except that wrapping C-libraries is really, really easy, even for
crappy programmers like me. :-) And there are a *lot* of C libraries
out there.

I really encourage you to put the build stuff aside for a while, and
spend some time writing some code --- anything at all. Chicken is a
great Scheme, super for the pragmatically-minded, rubber-hits-the-road
programmer.

I'm not disparaging your great build work --- but from your message it
sounds like you need a dose of application work (dare I say it?
application "fun"?) to balance your perspective.

Long live the Chicken,
Graham