The Bad Side of Scheme Shell

Posted by Daniel Lyons Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:50:00 GMT

I have never used such a frustrating development environment as scsh.

As much as I desperately want to like it, and should like it, for all the right reasons,

  • The interactive version is basically unusable. The REPL blows.
  • The built-ins seem fragile, especially the very-cool awk which I can’t seem to get to work.
  • DrScheme has library functions which should be present in scsh, but aren’t (fold-files comes to mind, probably because I’ve spent three hours trying to replicate the functionality in scsh and being unable to.)
  • Scsh is built on Scheme-48, which seems to be not particularly widely used compared to PLT and Bigloo/Chicken, so it’s missing SRFIs. Plus, loading SRFIs seems to be wonky (load doesn’t work, but the command line switch -l does, and it seems obnoxious that I’d have to use absolute paths for either.)

Scsh would be just perfect if someone had ever finished that port of it to PLT. As it stands right now, it sucks having two different Scheme environments on my machine: the really nice DrScheme one and then two different flavors of hell with Emacs, Hen mode for Chicken and run-scheme with scsh.

What to do, what to do.

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  1. Avatar Pi said 37 minutes later:

    I’m not going to say “I told you so”, but, “I told you so.”

  2. Avatar Hualing said about 5 hours later:

    That should be complicated. Do you have to switch much since you have two different environments?

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