Are there people using the Scheme programming language out there? [closed]

Answer 1

Absolutely. Scheme is good for a number of different classes of problems. Jim Blandy is working on a version of Scheme called Minor that integrates a lot closer with native systems and is meant to be performant.

I understand that LilyPond uses Guile for extensibility, although I don't know that I'd hold LilyPond as the ideal shining example of software as it seriously wounded my OS X installation...

Answer 2

I'm currently working through the SICP lectures that Abelson and Sussman gave at Hewlett-Packard in 1986 and the Cal-Berkeley CS61A podcasts given by Brian Harvey (taught from the same book) and following along in Scheme, and the experience is opening up whole new ways of thinking for me. To anyone who, like me, doesn't have any formal CS higher-education, I highly recommend it...

Answer 3

I am playing with IronScheme these days, but don't know anyone who uses Scheme for actual work.

Answer 4

I recently heard on the stackoverflow podcast that Reddit was originally written in LISP!

Answer 5

Beyond personal experience, the closest thing you'll get to an objective guess is the TIOBE index, which currently ranks LISP/Scheme 21st with 0.470% market share. TIOBE uses search engine results to create the list. Obviously, you'll want to take the list (and any other guess at Scheme usage) with a grain of salt.

Shameless promotion: check out PLT Scheme. They've created a nice community, offer their IDE for many platforms, and give you a nice library selection out-of-the-box.

Here's an article describing PLT Scheme in a commercial app: http://www.untyped.com/downloads/icfp068-welsh.pdf.

Answer 6

I've worked on a project with scheme code in production, it can be pretty cool stuff. Scheme had this cool feature of dynamically recompiling to self-optimize execution. I think it's like one step away from sky-net.