Scheme and Lisps are Great for production

10 months ago

The author shares their two-year journey using Scheme in production, developing libraries, web applications, and even an operating system on Guix.
Scheme is praised for its expressiveness, lambda calculus support, ease of understanding, standardization, and rapid development capabilities.
Common misconceptions about Scheme are addressed, including the difficulty of finding programmers, performance issues, and ecosystem importance.
Training new Scheme programmers is cost-effective, with resources like SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) recommended for onboarding.
Scheme's performance is competitive, especially compared to languages like Ruby, PHP, or Python, with a focus on learning, development, and execution speed.
The ecosystem's importance is debated, emphasizing that a language's expressiveness and paradigm are more critical than the size of its ecosystem.
Challenges for Scheme include its readiness for deep learning, community fragmentation, and not being purely functional, though it offers functional features.
Advantages of Scheme include its suitability for web development, time-saving coding practices, and the ability to build teams with deep computer science knowledge.

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