Drawing from specific needs in physics and in machine learning, we review software engineering systems associated with a selection of Scheme implementations and dialects relevant for scientific computing: Chez Scheme, CHICKEN, Gambit and Racket. We address the needs of an \emph{impatient schemer} who aims at profiting from currently available Scheme systems to solve research and data analysis problems. We examine aspects related to runtime performance, development tools (including availability of external libraries) and parallel computing. Based on two case studies, we first discuss the gap between the few Scheme numerical libraries and the extensive resources available for mainstream languages, which is a serious obstacle for prompt adoption of Scheme systems. Then we suggest that research projects building upon simple components can take advantage from Scheme-based languages to overcome expressiveness and efficiency limitations leading to cumbersome engineering practices in modern scientific computing. Further development of basic Scheme numerical libraries serving as common ground for the advancement of more specialized applications is desirable.
Scheme for scientific computing (scheme20-final9.pdf) | 581KiB |
Fri 28 AugDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
11:30 - 13:00 | |||
11:30 30mTalk | Clotho: A Racket Library for Parametric Randomness Scheme File Attached | ||
12:00 30mTalk | Scheme for scientific computing Scheme Francesco Montanari Universidad Autónoma de Madrid File Attached | ||
12:30 10mTalk | Designing a Programming Environment Based on the Program Design Recipe (Lightning Talk) Scheme Junya Nose Tokyo Institute of Technology, Youyou Cong Tokyo Institute of Technology, Hidehiko Masuhara Tokyo Institute of Technology File Attached | ||
12:40 10mTalk | On Teaching Type Systems as Macros (Lightning Talk) Scheme Youyou Cong Tokyo Institute of Technology, Naoya Furudono Tokyo Institute of Technology, Hidehiko Masuhara Tokyo Institute of Technology File Attached | ||
12:50 10mTalk | Programming with Petri Nets to Reason about Concurrency (Lightning Talk) Scheme Julien Lepiller Yale University File Attached |