I love Chicken Scheme. The community is awesome and tightly knit. They're always looking to help out new users. I was new to the community awhile back and got a ton of solid feedback on some work I was doing in Chicken. I published epoll bindings for Chicken after figuring out how things were done in their community.
As somebody looking to get into Scheme a bit, would you recommend Chicken as a good starting point for practical usage?
As a newcomer, there are just so many implementations to choose from, even when I restrict myself to choosing ones that can compile to C. Racket, Chicken, Gambit, Bigloo. They all look good on paper, and all feel the same (to me) when trying them out. What sets Chicken apart from the rest?
(FWIW, my research is leading me towards Chicken, but I've got that nagging voice in my head wondering if it's the right choice)
I've been using Chicken for five years to fulfill contracts for military, biotech and publishing clients.
While I set out at first to disprove the axiom that "Scheme is not commercially viable;" Chicken is now my preferred method of writing performant, robust and literate code.
I delivered a bizarre product for PSYOP [1] that involves crafting "lines of persuasion" for target audiences; another that prescribes chemotherapy regimens based on genetic profiles of tumors; and finally a wiki → docbook → latex compiler for textbooks.
A few things that really came in handy: XML ↔ S-expression equivalence (for writing functional XML parsers); code-data unification (for structurally composing documents); arbitrary precision arithmetic; etc.
Org-mode [1], actually; it has various mechanisms for embedding source code fragments in documents. The fragments can be evaluated when exporting to PDF, for instance; listed; or "tangled" (extracted) and compiled.
My projects usually evolve from a TODO file with source-code fragments for subproblems; then, by a process of conjugation, the fragments are tangled into viable products.
The TODO captures the evolution of the project, and follows the trajectory of eventually accepted or rejected ideas.
This article is from 2007. The founder of the project, Felix, stepped down some time ago, and I haven't been following it for the past few years. I'm not sure who's in charge, or what's been happening. Does anybody know the status of Chicken now?
Moritz from the Chicken community recently published a Mongrel2 egg as well (http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/mongrel2)