With Programming Languages, All Publicity Is Good Publicity

As the PLT-Scheme mailing list pointed out, Scheme was recently featured in an interview with developer who worked on a large real world system. The only catch, he was developing nasty AdWare. He explained:

S: You wrote adware. You bastard.

M: [sheepishly] Yes, I did. I got to write half of it in Scheme, which probably means that I deployed more Scheme runtime than anybody else on the planet.
...
There was also of course Scheme. Eventually, we got sick of writing a new C program every time we wanted to go kick somebody off of a machine. Everybody said, “What we need is something configurable.” I said, “Let’s install a Turing-complete language,” and for that I used tinyScheme, which is a BSD licensed, very small, very fast implementation of Scheme that can be compiled down into about a 20K executable if you know what you’re doing.

Eventually, instead of writing individual executables every time a worm came out, I would just write some Scheme code, put that up on the server, and then immediately all sorts of things would go dark. It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network.

If you ignore the fact that he's probably responsible for making your computer slow to a crawl, it's a good read, and a good endorsement.

I've actually had on my list for some time the idea of integrating TinyScheme and PHP. Imagine, the speed and libraries of PHP, and the code clarity of Scheme. It's a winner, right? I bet it's not all that hard to do, either.

I think this is proof that Evil Genius's not only prefer Linux, they also prefer Scheme.