[Noisebridge-discuss] Scheme programming language meetup

[John Magolske]

At the Tuesday meeting last week [1] I put out the idea of having a
meetup to explore the scheme programming language. Anyone interested?

I'm thinking an initial meeting to gage interest, share perspectives,
and plan what to study/explore for possible future meetups. I'd like
to do this at 2pm Sunday March 20th in the Church classroom.

My personal goals in pursuing this are to gain a better understanding
of basic CS concepts such as recursion, expressions, lists, functions,
scope, higher-order functions, etc., and hopefully find some
interesting web development projects to work on and learn with.

Currently I'm working through the book "The Little Schemer", which is
not a "how to program" book, but more of an "introduction to concepts"
kind of book. I donated a new copy of this to the Noisebridge library.
I like its quirky style.

Because scheme has been used in introductory CS courses at various
universities, there are lots of freely available books and
course materials out there. I've heard praise for "Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP) [2], I've also heard
it can be somewhat daunting. "Simply Scheme: Introducing Computer
Science" [3] is billed as a prequel, "...meant to teach you what you
need to know in order to read that book (SICP) successfully." I'm
inclined to dive into Simply Scheme next.

What got me interested in scheme was Chicken Scheme [4], which appears
to be a fairly performant high-level language with an active, friendly
community. They've an inclination towards web development [5] -- the
wiki engine [6] and static html generator [7] used to create their
website is written in Chicken. And they have eggs [8].

Any schemers out there?

John

----

[1] https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meeting_Notes_2011_03_08#Announcements

[2] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-38.html
    Related MIT OpenCourseWare:
    http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/

[3] Simply Scheme: Introducing Computer Science
    http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ss-toc2.html

[4] http://wiki.call-cc.org/
    http://lenz.unl.edu/wordpress/?p=18
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2241015

[5] http://www.mail-archive.com/chicken-users@nongnu.org/msg08125.html
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1911520
    http://demonastery.org/51/

[6] http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/qwiki

[7] http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/hyde

[8] http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-projects/egg-index-4.html

-----------------------

http://www.schemers.org/

The Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/scheme/

The Scheme Programming Language
http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/

Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days (TYSiFD)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme.html


-- 
John Magolske
http://B79.net/contact