Lobsters Interview with Sjamaan
Our dear @sjamaan ( website ) is a CHICKEN scheme maintainer and professional Clojure developer. We got to know each other on IRC over a few months and discussed: CHICKEN Scheme and its 6.0.0 release Scheme's community and standardization process Postgres, the horrors of MySQL and (default) SQLite Clojure My ongoing core contributions mainly focus on the numerical tower code, keeping the in-core…
Sjamaan, a CHICKEN scheme maintainer and professional Clojure developer, shared his computing journey and insights on Lisp languages. He began with a C64 and BASIC, later moving to PC and learning C. He discovered Lisp at university through The Little Lisper/Schemer and SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs).
Sjamaan started using CHICKEN Scheme after trying other Lisps like Scheme48 and PLT Scheme (now Racket). He appreciated CHICKEN's practicality, fast performance, and active community. He contributed to CHICKEN with eggs and eventually the core system, learning Lisp internals through experimentation and reading resources like Queinnec's "Lisp in Small Pieces," SICP, and Appel's "Compiling with Continuations."
When discussing Lisp books, Sjamaan pointed out that they often lack depth in topics like runtime systems, garbage collection, data representation, and cross-module optimizations. He emphasized the importance of clean, minimal languages like Scheme for experimentation and innovation, noting that standardization can sometimes compromise this by expanding the language's size.
Written by urgent.news from Lobsters's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
