[Bese-devel] UCW vs Seaside (and Scheme)

[Robert Marlow]

At Sat, 10 Sep 2005 10:34:28 -0400,
> In your email you made reference to the trade off compared to  
> "getting all the other benefits of common lisp". I assume you're  
> referring to benefits as compared to Scheme. If you don't mind, can  
> you elaborate briefly on this? For my edification purposes (and may  
> be others in the list), could you give me a few bullet items of these  
> benefits (e.g. CL vs Scheme)?


The benefits of CL compared to scheme, IMO, can be summarised in its
wealth of libraries. In the core language there's a powerful object
system (CLOS), a powerful condition system, useful debugging tools and
it's general utilities. Implementations also often incrementally
compile to machine code making them fast. Finally, there's a lot of
software out there for CL that's useful such as CLSQL which is very
useful for web apps and of course SLIME which is a great IDE.

You could pull off the same stuff in a scheme implementation, I just
don't happen to know of an implementation out there offering quite as
much or if they do, they're usually not quite as formalised. If there
were, I'd give serious consideration to using it.

Scheme OTOH offers first class continuations (which are simulated in
UCW), TCO, an arguably cleaner syntax and has a limited standard which
means implementations aren't forced to support horrid things like
packages in CL.

Then again, I haven't used many scheme implementations...