Re: [Chicken-users] Re: ... and a happy new year as well!

[Nicolas Pelletier]

Hello,

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 1:06 AM, Christian Kellermann
<address@hidden> wrote:
> * Ivan Shmakov <address@hidden> [100107 17:00]:
>> PS.  Currently, I'm about to begin my preparations for the course on
>>       computer networks I'd be carrying on for the second time.  While
>>       no part of the course the course has a specific focus on the
>>       network programming, I'd be glad to hear any suggestions on how
>>       Scheme (and functional programming in general) could be
>>       mentioned.

I'd suggest protocol analysis or traffic inspection. Chicken's support
for low-level access and easy ffi lets you hook almost anywhere in the
network stack. Then Scheme's power lets you use more advanced tools
for analysis (e.g. using a true parser to analyze a protocol, for
example with the packrat egg). On top of that, you can hook some
reasoning capabilities (for example, with the kanren egg) to detect
intrusions, attacks, questionnable traffic, or suggest an optimal
network configuration, etc...

Or you can go for server-side programming, for example cgi, connection
pooling, access policy... or even (gasp!) cloud computing (for
example, cluster or cloud controllers); the kind of thing that is
traditionally done in C with complicated data structures, a lot of
pointers, and no help from GC, closures, or symbolic programming. And
takes a lot of effort and money to develop and debug :-)

Another hot topic today is the semantic web (RDF, OWL and friends).
This is an area where high-level languages with dynamic and reasoning
capabilities (e.g. Scheme, Lisp, Prolog, for example) shine. Whether
you want to see the network from behind HTTP or not is up to you, of
course.

That's it for a few ideas.

-- 
Nicolas