I got Ao to a working state a few months before that exchange on the guile-users mailing list.
Guile works fine for Ao – it's clean and simple, plays nice with C FFI, and has a good REPL.
Racket was lower-impedance for the project discussed in that thread (and certainly has better documentation), but seems a bit heavy-weight for embedded use.
Racket always seemed a bit heavyweight to me in general. I'm more of a CHICKEN fan myself, though. You clearly are on the other side of that particular fight (r6rs vs. r4/5/7rs) though. Which is fine.
It may save your life. After learning what was going on in this country, I read it several times before the stasi's forcible, warrantless entry into my home in the middle of the night. I believe it has saved my life on more than one occasion. The reach of the police state in the US has extended to the more fortunate of us, I'm afraid. If you don't think it could happen to you, please reconsider. I'll tell you my stories some time.
I disagree, although I personally don't believe in the death penalty. He wasn't advocating vigilantism. American states that have the death penalty do so lawfully, in part as a deterrent.
Perhaps you should have asked him to clarify under what circumstances he would support the death penalty rather than admonishing him.
I don't believe in censoring opinions I don't happen to agree with. I think that is one of the ideas of the original article.
Sometimes there are borderline moderation calls, but this wasn't one. Perhaps it would be helpful to explain why.
HN is not all things. It is a site for civil, substantive discussion on topics of intellectual curiosity. A throwaway line suddenly invoking the death penalty is obviously not that—it's just talking smack on the internet. Maybe a detailed argument would have been different, but I doubt it. Pulling that rabbit out of hat is a stunt.
Not all opinions and contributions are equal. It's seductive to feel that they should be, until you realize that it isn't possible to treat all posts equally: if we did, the inflammatory, reflexive posts would win. That wouldn't just tip the balance—it would be a rout, because the people who prefer reflective, thoughtful discussion would leave. On HN we prefer reflective, thoughtful discussion. It's the rarer and more valuable species.
In a technical biological sense, no doubt all plants are equally valid. But if you want a garden you've got to pull weeds.
When I was a teenager in Kansas, my boss in the boat store where I worked had a saying:
"Kansas is a good place to say you are from."
It took a while for me to understand the pun, but even this saying is no longer true. Now it should be:
"Better to have never lived in Kansas at all."
Wichita, in particular, has been pushing an "innovation economy" and trying to attract entrepreneurs like it used to have (Bill Lear, the Carney brothers, Beech, Clyde Cessna). But the reality is that Wichita is on a cultural as well as an economic downturn (along with the rest of Kansas):
