Gerald Sussman Talking at ACM SIGPLAN Scheme '22 - Programming Should be Fun

Indeed!

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But what if you can't even get an interpreter for your language to run?

Sussman said something like "The specifications aren't handed down from the boss. Usually they come from an assessment of what is possible, ..." So it all hinges on the judgements programmers make about what is possible. Scheme is a community of sorts, see https://standards.scheme.org/ and it has a kind of meta-community in the form of something called the SRFI process. SRFI stands for Scheme Request For Implementation. Since around the year 2000 the number of requests has ballooned and there are now over 250 of them. The first twenty or so concerned language features and very widely useful libraries for strings, sets and so forth. The SICMutils package is a Clojure implementation of scmutils, which is a kind of generic algebraic computation library. It relies heavily on a feature unique to MIT/GNU Scheme called Application Hooks. This is a feature by which the interpreter can be extended to allow, for example, a tuple of functions to be applied to a tuple of arguments and return a tuple of results. This is not a feature of any RnRS Scheme. But it could be specified as a SRFI. Then any scheme implementation which supports that request would be able to run SICMutils unmodified. So who's the boss in this story?

See Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Long Dark Night.

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