I think that it helps a lot to have a daily practice of using a language for small things.

In much that same way that many people do the daily wordle or crossword, I do the daily leetcode.

I flip a coin and solve it first in either C++ or Python, then re-write my solution in the other one.

Usually it takes me around 20 minutes to solve it in either language, and 5 minutes to re-solve it in either language.

Recently I decided to start learning emacs lisp. This is an imperative lisp dialect that’s pretty different from scheme, but I think that the particular language doesn’t matter much for this process. I could a bit biased because I do have prior experience with SML and scheme.

I started re-solving the problems a third time in emacs lisp. And I’m still learning but I’ve felt my comfort with the language increase over time, and I expect that if I continue doing this then I will eventually reach parity with C++ and Python.

Currently it takes me about 20 minutes to re-solve a problem in emacs lisp, because I usually have to read documentation and/or look up something new.

• retrac

  today at 7:16 PM

  > I could a bit biased because I do have prior experience with SML

  You're probably under-weighing this factor.

  The average programmer looks at SML syntax and cannot make, pardon the expression if you will, heads or tails of it.

  Indeed, I'd argue the average programmer still considers recursion an advanced topic.

  • hibbelig

    today at 7:44 PM

    Recursion. Very interesting. My daughter didn’t know much about programming, then started CS. The first semester language was Ocaml and they of course used recursion quite heavily and she’d didn’t know it was supposed to be complicated. The second semester had assembly, C and Java and suddenly it was a problem. I had to remind her that she’s had already done it in the first semester.

• sillysaurusx

  today at 7:48 PM

  Where do you find a daily leetcode problem? Is there a website somewhere that publishes them?

  • senkora

    today at 8:19 PM

    It's a feature of the leetcode.com website. I actually can't find a URL that will directly link to the current day's problem, but you can open https://leetcode.com/problemset/ and select the current date in the calendar widget (at the top right on desktop, or by clicking the green calendar floating action button at the bottom right on mobile).

    You can view the daily problem without logging in or creating an account.

    Fair warning: today's daily problem is a "hard" difficulty and it is often worth skipping those or peeking at the solution. They can take a while to solve (often at least an hour) and/or rely on unusual tricks or data structures. I haven't solved this one yet so idk exactly what its deal is.

• throwaway27448

  today at 5:32 PM

  How did you arrive at C++ and Python? Yes I'm aware they have many structural and aesthetic differences, but why would you not choose a language with a different paradigm—functional, logical, even procedural, etc?

  • senkora

    today at 6:04 PM

    Good question. I chose them because they are the languages that I use professionally and would choose for technical interviews. I expect to be asked to solve problems in either language in any given interview.

    Technical interviews are different enough from day-to-day work that I still find it valuable to practice in them.

• today at 3:14 PM

If solutions come naturally to you in OOP, why not just roll with it?

Personally I find it easiest do design data flows: think about what we need in order to compute the result. The less I have to think about state the better. Functional patterns fall out and it feels simple and easy to me, so I do it. I'm way over the phase I thought that's somehow cooler than the OOP folks, however.

I've been forcing myself to stay within the CHICKEN ecosystem for the past 6 months. So far, the whole ecosystem moves really slow, but CHICKEN is such a good design that adding/rolling your own library for whatever you need is so simple. I ended up creating a bunch of eggs (CHICKEN libs) and even rolling my own web framework with its own ORM and background job processing that I rolled out to prod (1000+ users for the past 6 months or so, not a huge demo but it proved that it can scale/be good enough for my projects).

Best of all, is that the syntax grammar is so simple, that a simple CLAUDE.md + a few review agents lets me move super fast using AI. I spend most of my time anchoring on the design/plan and let AI write the implementation for most of the code.

Scheme was invented as a consequence of Sussman & Steele’s discovery that lexical closures in the lambda calculus had essentially an identical implementation to a fully elaborated version of Hewitt’s actor model.

I do wonder what a language with the same “taste” and minimalism as Scheme but embracing the actor model would look like. Erlang?

Even better if someone could figure out how to harmonize them in the same language: “There are exactly two ways to do it, and they’re interchangeable.”

• mepian

  today at 2:41 PM

  > I do wonder what a language with the same “taste” and minimalism as Scheme but embracing the actor model would look like.

  There is Spritely Goblins: https://spritely.institute/goblins/

  • twoodfin

    today at 2:53 PM

    A 98-page PDF on language design for distributed objects in a capability security model? Made my day, thanks!

• cmoski

  today at 7:57 PM

  LFE: lisp flavoured Erlang?

  https://lfe.io/

• bitwize

  today at 3:33 PM

  In terms of modern concurrent actors, in addition to Spritely Goblins there is also Termite, a restricted Scheme with Erlang-like concurrency semantics that now comes with the Gambit distribution.

Strange that the post makes no mention of the Little Schemer series, because teaching you to "think Scheme" is exactly what those books do. Some people are put off by the weird style (combination of children's book visuals and socratic logic problem presentation), but they work!

• SoftTalker

  today at 5:45 PM

  I struggled with The Little Lisper (as it was called at the time) in school but as I approach the other end of my career I've given some thought to working through it again. I think it would come a lot more easily now. Though I looked at Haskell maybe 10 years ago and never got traction with it.

  Functional or declarative programming styles appeal to me, and I love what I've learned of Erlang but never really had a job where I could use it. Used SQL a lot and quite like it as well.

I went back and forth with ChatGPT on this a while ago. I concluded that my main problem with Lisps (and C) is that types don’t have their core functions associated with them concretely. The only way to know strcat, puts, and strlen exist is…to know that they exist. This vexed me. We lightly mapped out the idea of having traits for types in lisp and then having those traits and their associations frozen at compile time. That way, you could see which traits a given type implements and feel your way around the language more confidently.

However, like “If you give a mouse a cookie”, I realized that once I had my traits that I also wanted compile-time attributes à la Rust/C# and there’s no clean way to add those to Lisp’s syntax without seriously cluttering it up (note: yes, function-level attributes would look fine but C# allows attributes on locals, iterators, and usings which just don’t mesh with Lisp’s syntax).

I gave up. Lisp is neat but it just doesn’t fit in the future of programming that Rust and C# have shown us.

You may like Rhombus, all the power of Racket in a Python-like syntax

Official docs: https://docs.racket-lang.org/rhombus/index.html

Collection of small examples: https://github.com/racket/rhombus/blob/master/demo.rhm

I studied Scheme in CS around 1990, but also found it hard to grasp and to apply to real world problems. And all those parethesis, brrr... :) The idea that "everying is an object and classes are nothing special" is neat, but it does not fit the way people (okay, I) think about real world problems. So I stuck with Smalltalk/OOP and am stil there :-).

scheme is great, but the dx of some implementations is not. i’m on guile scheme due to guix, and frankly, i’m hating it a quite bit.

stack traces are esoteric and error messages entirely unhelpful,

documentation masquerades as deep but is indeed inconsistent and prosaic, mixing styles of reference, explanation, and how-to willy-nilly, (compare with Dybvig’s The Scheme Programming Language, which is focused and consistent, and it takes no time to get your answers; there’s just no method to guile and guix manuals), i hate it big time,

there’s big gaps in documentation (especially with Guix – there’s literally zero information about `define-record-type*` which is used everywhere in its codebase; admittedly, not scheme related, but still),

the cli requires too much memorization,

most modules are not named, but numbered, ie, instead of something like `(base list)`, you get `(srfi srfi-1)`, so you need to either memorize, or go through the info pages for each procedure you need to import, which means you also need to know the exact names for the procedures you need beforehand,

there’s like 4 ways to define a record, each with a different feature set and incompatibilities,

etc.

these are the reasons i find it hard to use.

to respond to the content of the article, the different neurotype idea is off, because scheme allows you very well to express sequences of operations; the ecosystem of APIs may not cater to this tho. although if it was rephrased into “scheme emphasizes symbolic manipulations, as opposed to operating a machine”, i would agree

• hilsdev

  today at 3:41 PM

  I am only amateur level with scheme but these are common to other scheme implementations. SRFIs are semi-standardized core libraries that work mostly the same in all implementations. I believe the record-type and records generally are one of these SRFIs, and it’s based on a chapter in SICP (several show up as sections of the book where students implement things that would be language feature in a larger env)

  All the Lisp implementations seem to have pretty cryptic seeming errors, but it also seems to be very informative to those who know how to parse the call stack and how to expand/dig down in the built in debuggers. This is likely because of the same idea as those record-types, much of the language is built in the same lisp you’re running - so the error messages go a few levels lower level than you would expect. It’s not just a C syntax error type explanation, but rather you get some error about a bad call to a function you’ve never heard of running below that feature we normally associate with being a core function

• gausswho

  today at 4:01 PM

  I explored migrating from NixOS to Guix, and I also hit the wall with the quirks of Guile Scheme. Architecturally, I find a Guix much clearer API than NixOS and aspire to the peace of mind that would come with a compiled system configuration. When I leaned into LLM's for support and they were substantially less effective at getting me over the line, not just conceptually but being able to close their parens properly. I ultimately decided to bail on the experiment, but it left me sad because my hunch was that if Guix were in nearly any other non-lispy language I'd have stuck through it.

I understand the challenge, but is Graham (OP?) getting too caught up in how the code ought to look, rather that what it ought to do. I don't think it matters much initially how a piece of work looks as long as it does what's intended. Afterwards it does; particularly if you need to involve other developers, and to them, the idioms looks "strange". I'm not convinced that there's an ALGOL neurotype that's distinct from a LISP(?) neurotype. I think it's a bit of a spectrum like everything else.

You might try Common Lisp instead.

You can write entirely imperative OO code in Scheme, it just has syntax that's weirder than you're used to. Not everything has to be functional abstractions, syntax macros, or twisty mazes of call/cc. If SICP is too abstruse, give HTDP a try, but if you know other languages, you already know most of scheme.

I bounced off Scheme so many times I just created my own lisp instead. At some point I just accepted that I wouldn't ever be comfortable in any language other than the one I made myself. I too have the ALGOL neurotype...

> Obviously an LLM generated the code, but I felt comfortable following along and understood what it was doing, reading and Trusting the Tests. [...] My difficulty is with thinking the way that lets me write Scheme.

There's your problem, right there. Vibe-coding is sabotaging learning before you even start.

You can learn some things by reading good code, but there's no substitute for the exercise of thinking through problems yourself. (Also, an LLM won't necessarily give you good code.)

First learn paint fence, Daniel-san. Not watch third-hand videos spliced together of other people painting the fence, and thinking you'll understand much of anything about it.

> I have the ALGOL neurotype.

Good news! Scheme started as a block-structured imperative "algorithmic" language in the spirit of ALGOL. Just with more parentheses.

Write as if in ALGOL, but using Scheme's comparable syntax and language features. And lots of parentheses.

Don't get confused by CS professors showing you pure-functional features, the metacircular evaluator, recursive programming, syntax extension and language-oriented programming, etc. You can come back to that.

Just start coding ALGOL-style in Scheme. You'll accomplish something in an hour.

Once you see it's easy, and are comfortable with that part, then the next thing you do, to get more idiomatic is one of the following, then do the other one:

* Try to get more functional, by eliminating some of the mutations of variables in your code. For example, if you're using `set!` a lot, can you eliminate them by, for example, making them arguments in a named-`let` recursion. (Or, instead of named-`let`, spell out the recursive functions, like some intro CS professors will want you to do, but that can obscure things that are obvious once you see the named-`let` lexical structure.)

* Try to get more language-oriented, by making a little domain-specific language, maybe with `syntax-rules`, `syntax-case`, or `syntax-parse`.

One more tip, for anyone coming from C, C++, Rust, etc., who may like trying to know the cost of everything: If you get hung up on high-level language features like GC, and not knowing which of a number of ways of doing something, is the right (performant) way, try not to. But if you want an intuition (that might be a lie), imagine that needless mutations or allocations may be more expensive than finding a different way to do it. And each FFI call has very expensive overhead. At one point that I had to make highly performant code, I made a little tool, to help confirm my intuitions: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/shootout/ There's also a statistical profiler in Racket now, and you can even (with work) rig it up in production systems, for measuring real-world workloads, which I used to guide optimizing performance of a large and complicated system.

I think it's the symptom of inadequate practice rather than some "language neurotype". Consider writing (yeah 2026 I know) a substantial project in Scheme from scratch.

• Pay08

  today at 2:36 PM

  Two websites don't sound like insubstanial projects.

  • r14c

    today at 7:48 PM

    With LLMs you can make 20 websites and still not really understand the language. For learning you really do have to type the code out yourself. That's how you build familiarity and understanding. Reading code is a good starting point, but it doesn't really gel until you start writing your own ideas down, fail, and try again until it works and makes sense. Especially if you're working in a new language with unfamiliar semantics.

There's something very ironic about an article about bouncing off Scheme on a website called 'SICPers'. OT: I think I'm pretty decent at thinking in Scheme, although I don't quite have the hang of continuations. That said, because I like type declarations I use Common Lisp, which allows me to bounce between a more Scheme-like style and a more Assembly-like style however I see fit.

I've had a similar problem. I originally started learning programming with BASIC, assembly, procedural, event-driven, languages, found OOP bloated and thus counter productive, time consuming, still do. Have tried to focus on functional languages, but for some reason none stick. Not sure if it is my brain, or haven't found the right language that will work with my head. I'm trying my luck at Odin to see if that can stick with me.

> When I think about a programming problem, I think in terms of the sequence of instructions I need the computer to do, and the memory locations that can hold the information the computer needs to track.

You’re almost there. Just stop thinking about the sequence of instructions. Focus on the information half (the values) that you need to produce.

I've had to go through my Scheme labs when I was studying CS. Even as a hobbyist with a decade of experience in various languages and a decent intuition for coding, I couldn't get my head around it. It's quite telling that a language that is hard to read, unfit for most purposes and that even proficient coders never seem to fully grasp, was chosen as a tool to introduce beginners to coding.

I was the same way (and still am somewhat, I can't get hygenic macros into my head) but due to the differences between Scheme and Common Lisp. What helped me was writing imperative code that Scheme people would surely scoff at, and gradually using more and more Scheme features as I kept writing. Then I refactored the whole codebase to look like the final few hundred lines.

• bitwize

  today at 3:37 PM

  Oh, kinda like how I learned Emacs: use it "wrong" for years, treating it as a sort of weird archaic Notepad++, then gradually discover features, master the keybindings, and learn to program Emacs Lisp over time until my proficiency, and the utility the editor provided to me, grew.

  these days i'm seriously considering switching to zed tho

  • Pay08

    today at 7:13 PM

    That sounds like a horrible way of learning Emacs, but fair enough. I don't think you need to know elisp as a prerequisite but personally I learnt enough of it to be able to get by without Customize.

    You might want to read Zed's EULA.

    • bitwize

      today at 7:42 PM

      Well, I'm sorry for not employing a Hackernews-approved data-driven, spaced-repetition learning technique utilizing Pomodoro, Zettelkasten, and balanced gut bacteria to optimize the time to proficiency. I was frickin' 18 when I discovered Emacs (and Linux), it was 1995, and most of us were just figuring this crap out as we went.

      I do not use Zed's online services, only the editor itself which is GPLv3. If I need AI I wire in a third-party ACP provider, which is easy enough to configure.

Do what works for you.

Is it possible you're too stupid to write scheme? Because that's where I think I am, I've also tried and failed to write it a few times.

• jfengel

  today at 2:41 PM

  Programming languages, like natural languages, are tools for human beings, not computers. They work around the strengths and weaknesses of a human brain.

  It's not a question of being smart or stupid. It's whether the tool fits the task it's applied to and the affordances it gives the user.

  Scheme is intended more as a teaching tool than an actual language. Its simplicity is perfect for reasoning about programs. It's less well suited to practical tasks.

  About the only really difficult lesson of Scheme is if you use it as a purely declarative language. Imperative features are a natural affordance of the human brain. Working with them is beautiful and alien.

• convolvatron

  today at 3:57 PM

  I don't know you, but it seems very unlikely. scheme is a little different because it doesn't really encode or enforce 'standard patterns' that serve as mold that we pour code into. that probably means that its not quite as clear where to start. but at least in r4rs-land its based on a very small number of general simple primitives.

  I think it's refreshing change of perspective, and certainly worth pursuing if you're interested at all in in building programming structures rather than just using them. but if its not at all to your taste I wouldn't beat yourself up about it.