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3 points by soegaard 6086 days ago | link | parent

It is actually easy to underestimate DrScheme. It's not just for beginners, but also for wizards.


1 point by tokipin 6086 days ago | link

i'm sure it is very good, i was just talking about the graphical aspects of it. maybe you're referring to my mention of Vim, but i wasn't comparing. Vim is IDE-wise completely lacking, but that's something that doesn't bother me, especially due to its superior-to-all-others editing model. and the reason i say Eclipse would be a better choice is just because it's substantially prettier and more familiar

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3 points by soegaard 6086 days ago | link

For editing text Vi and Emacs are preferred by quite a few hackers.

However for editing Scheme, DrScheme is the best choice. Not because it is "graphical", but simply because it was designed with one purpose only: writing Scheme code.

It has all the standard stuff (such as: to show the documentation on an identifier just press F1), but it also contain the Scheme specific stuff, that you won't notice until you try some advanced Scheming.

Among the most impressive features is how precise the error messages are reported. This goes for both standard errors, but not the least when macros are involved. If you compare the error reports you get from a few errorneous macros in DrScheme and in a standard Scheme implementation, you'll see that you can save a lot of time if you use DrScheme.

And while at, don't forget try the macro stepper...

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3 points by cooldude127 6086 days ago | link

i like drscheme in general. there is one problem with it that made it simply unusable by me. when you hit run in drscheme to reevaluate your definitions, it obliterates my entire history in the REPL. i need to have that stuff around to retry expressions.

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3 points by soegaard 6086 days ago | link

That's by design. [I can dig up a reference, if you are interested]

If you want to retry expressions, stay in the REPL and use ctrl-p (one or more times) to recall previous expressions.

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