Post #2240213
2026-05-07 16:14 UTC
man, #guile #scheme is v cool, v v good.
(but also, i really really struggle with the absensce of nil punning. instead of nil everywhere have '(), \#f, and the dreaded \#<unspecified>. why on earth would i want my when clause to return the latter when it could just return nil? i can't fathom it.)
e.g. this bit of the manual i find glaringly, demonstrably false:
"When you go to write an ‘if’ without an alternate (a “one-armed ‘if’”), part of what you are expressing is that you don’t care about the return value (or values) of the expression."
but guile v cool, v v good.
(now i'm gonna turn into one of those folks dreaming about guile emacs, coz it if worked out you'd imaging writing all your extensions and packages and hacks in this elegant motherfucker of a lisp...)
Replies (2)
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@janneke@todon.nl 2026-05-07 16:18
@mousebot@todon.nl Fail early? Less "happy" accidents? Stricter typing is mostly better?
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@pkw@snac.d34d.net 2026-05-07 16:28
I have found the idioms of common-lisp and scheme around true and false and the empty list BOTH GOOD. But also very different. Like common-lisp does what you usually want, but scheme is more logically consistent. Scheme makes me happier to be more functional, like I use when and unless less in scheme because the functional idiom is to always return something. (what does "when" return on a true argument?) I am liking scheme especially after using common-lisp, and the cool thing is i assume the opposite would be true as well.