I also can't believe how many other comments (not yours) in the comments on this post are like "this is a good idea" and "we should consider this" and etc.
I'm amazed. Most of the people on here responding as such are, I'm guessing, are people from my generation: "millenials" who grew up natively on the internet, probably even hung out on Slashdot and etc when that was big. Slashdot had a lot of problems (so does this site, not gonna lie) but OMG I can't imagine a post like this appearing on 2005 era Slashdot and 1/3 of the people being like "but why not this probably is a good idea".
I thought when my generation grew up and had kids, we'd try to stand up for digital rights as being important for the next generation, because we experienced why it was important ourselves. I am depressed by just how wrong I was.
> I thought when my generation grew up and had kids, we'd try to stand up for digital rights as being important for the next generation,
Yeah, but the internet we had has kids is far different than what we have today.
IMO the biggest difference is that it used to cost things to be on the internet: time and/or money. Sites weren't just GUI/WYSIWYG. You had to spend time building them. You had to have initiative. People's goals were different (I feel) than today. Knowledge and transfer of that knowledge was a big deal.
Now it seems like everything is about making a buck. You can't just let kids go wild online. There is some seriously dark stuff and it doesn't take a lot to get there. Hell, you can't even open some apps on a default install of something like macOS without the risk of pornography showing up.
There's something to trying to figure out how to adjust your productivity structures to be more productive, and then eventually you hit a falloff in terms of where it stops helping.
This blogpost feels very ironic to me... I know I'm not the first to point it out, that the blogpost's obsession with a feeling of productivity is just way too meta given the blogpost itself, but the point where about 5 self-help resources are all quoted is the point where the whole thing started to feel a bit doomed to me.
"she didn't mention any of these"... my name is Christine, it's right at the top of the post...
At any rate, most of the approaches you're taking resemble Chicken Scheme's "compile to C" approach, which is all good and well, but doesn't accomplish the (questionable, and the post questions it) quasi-definition of "systems language" I was exploring in the post... it's something that compiles to it, but doesn't have the underlying characteristics of something written directly in it. More in the post I wrote in reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32058142
It could be! Btw, macro_lisp is hilarious, nice job.
My post was specifically aiming at talking to the Guile community as in terms of something useful and befitting of that community's use. A "Lisp Flavored Rust" would be interesting if someone wanted to do it though.
Uhoh. Author of the post here. You know, when a post leaves its target audience, it can really make all the difference, huh? Last week I had a post on HN's frontpage and it was aimed at a general audience, it was an introductory topic (an intro to Scheme, without assumptions of involvement in that community). This time it's a post of mine I wrote off the cuff talking to a specific audience about a specific topic (specifically, me musing out loud about a project that would be interesting to the Guile community, to the Guile community). And that's fairly reflective in the replies here.
- Common Lisp is the only real lisp and anyone who's not using it reinvented it badly? Check.
- Questioning what is "systems programming" and yes I actually already did that in the post itself, it's a large portion of the post's text? Check.
- "It really ought to be in Rust because Rust is awesome?" Check.
The point of this post is, to the Guile community, "This would be an interesting thing for us to explore, here's what I've been loosely thinking about exploring it... what do you think? Anyone else excited to talk about this with me?" (It turns out, within that community: yes.) It's not hating on Common Lisp, it's not saying that existing lisps aren't already "systems languages" (I agreed on that in the post), and no I'm not aiming for this to be Rust because we have Rust and you can use Rust and that's cool!
And the other point of the post is: this is a hilarious name, "Guile Steel"... "Guile" + "Guy L. Steele" + "close to the metal". And also, PreScheme is a pretty cool thing that's been underexplored outside of Scheme48 and hey maybe we should think about whether that's a cool direction we should modernize on!
So anyway, if you feel annoyed because this isn't targeting Your Favorite Thing, that's cool... it isn't! You're super welcome to read the post, just know who the audience is, following the above. :)
May I suggest looking into Lokko Scheme[1]? It's a R6RS Scheme capable of booting in bare metal, even has a small OS available that you can boot up in QEMU, it even runs Doom! It's a great project, check it out.
There is actually already a Scheme interpreter implemented in Rust (https://github.com/mattwparas/steel) which has the same name for the exact reasons you stated.
A tree walking intrepreter can be an excellent way to prototype type systems, concurrency models, verification, etc.
Again, this is a tutorial, for newcomers, which happens to include a tree walking interpreter. I think you've pushed the goalpost pretty far back just because a reasonably interesting one was hit at all.
