Interview with Chicken Scheme Maintainer Sjamaan/Peter Bex
a day ago
- Peter Bex is a CHICKEN Scheme maintainer and professional Clojure developer, contributing mainly to numerical tower, irregex library, and bug fixes.
- He started computing with a C64 and BASIC, later learned C and then Scheme via The Little Schemer and SICP, which made functional programming click.
- CHICKEN attracted him for its practicality, speed, good community, and acceptable license; it uses the Cheney on the MTA technique.
- He finds Scheme a clean, minimal language facilitating experimentation, and notes tension between standardization and minimalism.
- CHICKEN 6 is base R7RS, with UTF-8 improvements, strict string/bytevector separation, and backward compatibility; a heap corruption bug delayed release.
- Future CHICKEN plans include teaching the compiler about unsafe intrinsics via a prelude, and a minimal date/time module for core.
- Peter's preferred domains: web stuff (HTTP/URI), CHICKEN internals, performance optimization, Postgres, and distributed systems (which he avoids if possible).
- He favors Postgres over MySQL due to its reliability, lack of footguns, and advanced features like LISTEN/NOTIFY, window functions, CTEs.
- He dislikes SQLite for unsafe defaults and value typing; prefers Postgres for relational work, and rarely uses JSON in DBs.
- He doesn't fully embrace REPL-driven development, often preferring save-and-run tests; finds Clojure's nil punning and map-centric approach unappealing but values its Lisp revival impact.
- Snapshot testing is useful for refactoring; he enjoys performance optimization, refactoring, and vulnerability investigation.
- Outside programming, family brings him joy; he lifts weights to combat age-related health issues and aims for a balanced life.