(preferp 'language 'CL) => T

We had switched to PLT-Scheme as our platform a few weeks back for some simple reasons, mainly because of the available libraries and the cross-platform implementation. However, there are things about that environment that really caused us problems, mainly, because we have been spoilt by Common Lisp.

The most irritating thing of the PLT-Scheme environment, DrScheme is the disconnect between the editor and the REPL. One of the best things about CL is loading functions into the environment on the fly. Once you load your test data in memory, and you have a test environment set up, there is no need to do that again.

It is common practice to write and rewrite functions in the running environment. This makes it extremely productive. With the open source/free CL implementations, Emacs with Ilisp or Slime is the environment. The commercial ones come with their own which are also pretty good, maybe even better.

This can be due to our own lack of knowledge of PLT-Scheme. We found the "Execute" button to be our enemy. When you press "Execute" it reloads all the current definitions into a new environment after resetting it. This in effect reduces the environments productivity levels to that of non-interactive languages.

We decided to switch back to CL, despite the issues we had with the open source and free implementations. We already find that it is a better programmer environment, at least for us. In future if an when we decide to switch to a commercial CL, the transition will also probably be easier than from Scheme.