In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit. No not a nasty dirty wet hole, nor yet a dry bare sand hole: it was a hobbit hole and that meant comfort.

I have a rather Bilbo Baggins like feeling about computing these days. I work in a predominantly .Net shop and am part of the Competency Center or Center of Excellence of a multinational corporation – which is to say that we are the specialists in our technology field. Or so they say… now being from the .Net camp I should be here getting excited about the next set of new features in Whidbey or what ‘cool’ things the next grid control offers or the way WSE 2.0 specs have been supported in VS or… you get the picture.

Of late however I have a feeling that Gandalf has coming knocking at my hobbit hole of technology and I have gone off after this great dragon called Scheme that guards his treasure. And people come by my cubicle and say – Rosh! What is that stuff you are working on?

And is say – Oh that is emacs and that is scheme

“Duh?”

“Oh.. Scheme is a dialect of Lisp and emacs was this editor written in the late 70s, popularized by RMS’s GNU version – but I am using a derivative called XEmacs… it itself is designed as lisp interpreter… ”

By then their eyes have all glazed over and they peek at my monitor and go “And what good is that… let me see .. car cdr lambda let lambda lambda lambda…whats this nonsense? you are just wasting your time.”

“No no, its pretty interesting” I say, “it shows you new ways to think and ….  “

“and it lets me write procedure objects and optimizes tail recursion and call-with-current-continuation… “. “… and because scheme supports the imperative style it has a ‘set!’ but it does not have any loops…”

And what I hear back is “What?? A language with no loops???”. I wonder where all the other stuff I said went, anyway “Contrived languages!”

In hobbit speak this would have amounted to saying… Nasty things these adventures, gets you home late for dinner and that kind of stuff. No respectable hobbit would go on an adventure.

And friends say,

“what about your blog Rosh? People don’t come there to read scheme, what about your readers?” (what readers? < sniff />).

And I say, “ yeah but scheme is pretty interesting and the point in blogging is that I write what I have running in my mind… “

 Anyway, after being at scheme for a bit now, I must say, I am rather enjoying it. I think I am learning to walk-the-walk rather than just talk-the-talk. Its been a couple of days since I have had my head stuck at not being able to write anything non-trivial with call/cc. I think that is beginning to clear up today. It is a good feeling.

If I had been braver like I once was, I would have compared myself to Jonathan Seagull talking to the Breakfast Flock, here in the blog entry. Winning call/cc will be like learning how to do a high speed dive onto the wall of ocean surface, and being able to pull out of it gracefully. Or like being able to take the Arkenstone from under the great Smaug, or in this reality - the great Scheme.

I am not that brave now. But I think I am enjoying learning to be a little schemer.