Re: [Chicken-users] hygienic branch (progress report, sort of)

[Andrew Gwozdziewycz]

On May 14, 2008, at 10:52 AM, felix winkelmann wrote:

It's silent in here.... So, let me use this moment to give

some progress info on the state of the "hygienic"

chicken that I'm currently working on. In

As someone who has been searching for a Scheme to use

I couldn't be happier to see this message. I've been using

Python as my general purpose language of choice but have

grown bored of using it.

I found Scheme last year and have been shopping for an 

implementation for general use. I love it's simplicity. I love

it's expressiveness. But what I've never liked is that there

is no standout implementation that seems great for general

purpose, everyday use.

I found Gauche to be fairly good, but had trouble adopting 

it completely. The same can be said for Scheme48 and 

PLT. All have benefits, but they just never fit right. When I 

decided last week to give Chicken a try, I could not have 

been more happy to find that I was able to get up and 

running and complete the task I needed to do more quickly

than I could have done it in Python.

I needed to do some simple image manipulation, and the

task required a little bit of work. Automation was necessary.

I started python, typed "import Image" and found that I 

hadn't reinstalled the Python Imaging Library since the last

time I reinstalled my computer. Naturally, I went ahead and

installed it, only to find out that I didn't have libjpeg, libpng

or libgif installed to the point where PIL would even work for

what I needed. Having seen some things in "eggs unlimited"

I figured, why not?

Enter Chicken. It compiled relatively quickly, and started 

super quick. Searching for eggs, I found imlib was available

and quickly compiled libjpeg, libgif, libpng and imlib2. I 

decided I'd run chicken-setup imlib2 and see what happened.

I had nothing else to lose, but when it downloaded, and 

compiled successfully, I was ready. I quickly typed 'csi', 

(require-extension imlib2) and (define x (imlib:load "test.jpg")).

I was hooked--completed the task at hand with a bit of help

from the imlib2 documentation and went to bed. 

Then, after reading some more documentation I saw some

things that disappointed me. Macros for instance seemed like

an after thought, and weird to me that I had to install an 

extension to use define-syntax. And then, felix saved the day.

I will keep using chicken. I'll hopefully contribute. I'll hopefully

get to a point where I'll never have to "import Image" again. 

Thanks everyone for all of your hard work in making chicken,

and thanks felix for sending this message just at the right time

when I needed to hear it.

--

Andrew Gwozdziewycz

address@hidden

http://www.apgwoz.com  |  http://www.photub.com

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