Results of the CHICKEN Survey 2011

The total number of respondents is 47.

Nationality, education, professional background

Nationality

Highest educational degree obtained

Professional status

Programming experience

Programming experience with one or more of Lisp, Scheme, ML, Haskell, Clojure, Scala

Use of CHICKEN Scheme

How did you discover CHICKEN Scheme?

How long have you been using CHICKEN Scheme?

How would you characterise your use of CHICKEN Scheme?

What is the status of CHICKEN Scheme at your workplace?

In which domain(s) are you using CHICKEN?

In which domain(s) are you using CHICKEN if other?

Scripting (I suppose that falls under "System administration" though); research

Working with text files

Teaching myself lisp. My work is in computational linguistics so I try things out related to that.

Use the hyde egg for blogging engine

Image processing, machine learning, data analysis.

Electronics Design Automation

I use CHICKEN for teaching about programming paradigms and language features and also for teaching concurrent programming. I also often use CHICKEN for scripting.

natural language processing, search engines

Multi-language programming

custom build system

Computational linguistics

Which other Scheme implementations are you using?

The future of CHICKEN Scheme

If CHICKEN disappeared, what languages will you consider as replacement?

What have been the most important advantages for you in using CHICKEN?

What have been some other advantages for you in using CHICKEN?

Although CHICKEN has changed over the years, the C source has always been stable in the sense that it compiled out of the box (at least for me), on a variety of machines and operating systems (incl. old PowerPCs)

Closely tied to C.

Interaction with C and its relative speed (over say Racket) are major advantages for myself. Also, ease of compiling into a distributable executable.

Good documentation [submitted by two different respondents]

Simplicity; portability of C code (generated and compiler).

Efficiency! CHICKEN is quite fast.

It is relatively simple compared to the other schemes I've tried.

Portability, very few dependencies

I can't say enough good things about the community. The culture of the mailing-list and IRC channel are positive, helpful and inviting. While I find CHICKEN to be technologically superior to other Schemes, I'd be happy to turn my back on it if the community wasn't just so great. Truly, the community is where the greatest portion of CHICKEN's value lies. The CHICKEN community is a shining example of Open Source Software at its finest.

It's super cool!

compilable

Small Package, AOT compilation to native code

The CHICKEN C-FFI is by far the most complete, effective, and easiest to use of any Scheme implementation out there. Combined with CHICKEN's superior "lolevel" functionality, nothing else even comes close.

It's a system for real world projects. The developers understand the user's needs (instead of trying to to tell them what is good for them - a common issue in the scheme community)

Exceptionally stable and reliable

The egg system is wonderful and practical

It tightly integrates with Unix environments. I appreciate that, rather than being separate and monolithic, that chicken is build from existing Unix tools/techniques and works within a Unix philosophy.

What have been the most important disadvantages for you in using CHICKEN?

What have been some other disadvantages for you in using CHICKEN?