Why what and how do I learn scheme language
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I am in a process of studying Scheme - functional programming language. While it is also a dialect of the programming language Lisp.
Why scheme?
- Some introductions to computer science start with this language so you don’t have to be a rocket scientist
- It is not a new language so there is a lot of documentation about it
- The books that I use can be found online for free as well as solutions to exercises
- While it is old, it is still used
- Emacs is a text editor that can do a lot of things aside from text editing and it uses another lisp dialect so knowing scheme would help using it
- GNU Guile is the preferred extension system for the GNU project
and it has implementation of scheme, guile is used at guix cool package manager and a distro.
What to read?
I started with SICP but recursion seemed confusing and some other stuff too, the book is made for MIT students, which assumes you know some stuff (like math) already
Not exactly a read but a video, blast from the past actually, its sicp again.
So I found Simply scheme which is way easier to understand, and is designed as a prequel for SICP
What software to use?
- There is a DrRacket which has cua keys (like windows/mac copy paste etc), it looks nice but “simply scheme” requires some files to be loaded and I could not load them in DrRacket
- Emacs has no problems with loading files, so I decided to use it (EDIT: it actually has other problems and I would recommend DrRacket unless you want to learn emacs instead of scheme)