MIT-GNU-Scheme under the container environment

Why I talks about this programming language?

When we join in a new community, we can email the specific email group for more information and detail. Do not be shy, this is a good way for similar with the community as soon as possible.

So, I follow this way. Send email to the GNU maintainer and receive lots of people's suggestions by email.

I'm glad to see this and thanks for every maintainer's suggestion.

And this is my first time heard MIT/GNU-Scheme, multiple GNU style OS extensions were developed by MIT/GNU-Scheme, so this is a good start point for newer like me.

How to install MIT/GNU Scheme?

It’s easy for us, just go to the official website(https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/) and follow the tutorial to install MIT/GNU-Scheme.

First, go to and download the target architecture you want to deploy.

Second, follow the GNU project document https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/stable/mit-scheme-user.html to install MIT/GNU-Scheme by the command.

We can follow SICP https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html to learn more detail of MIT/GNU-Scheme, especially we need to know what’s mean of algorithm to the programming language?

There is not easy to learn this book due to different background, it's boring, but please keep persist in it.

The simplest way is finish this book.

Summary

MIT/GNU-Scheme is simple to install and we have clearly material(MIT SICP) to lean how use it, especially use it to implement the algorithm step by step due to MIT/GNU-Scheme special struct we can get more of the algorithm(I mean simple to understand the what happened on the every step of algorithm).

For my personal experiences

I knew that I must finish this book, and although I knew it is not easy target. But I’m on my way.

I said before in other article that I have many different architecture devices, MacOS, Windows 10(inside the Ubuntu20.04 Desktop as a virtual machine) and Ubuntu20.04 Desktop.

So, I need to install MIT/GNU-Scheme to all of them. This is not a good idea, and this is not my way.

At the same time, I saw we can use container as the development environment.

Finally, an idea achieve in my mind. I can develop a container environment base on Debian x64 and automatic install the latest version of MIT/GNU-Scheme.

And it was contributed to the VSCode project, the address below https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers, and you can find MIT/GNU-Scheme container development environment in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/tree/main/containers/mit-scheme, just follow the tutorial of the project to use it.

Simple and fast.

As you can see we can use the container technology as our environment without preparing the specific environment.

Moreover, the container development environment can easy cross multiple platform(the environment just needs to support x64 container technology and installed container runtime), now we use docker CLI as the container client tool.

Conclusion

There may have many ways to help us build our development environment. Although, the official of MIT/GNU-Scheme web site does not list the use MIT/GNU-Scheme under container environment. I have been send the email to request this to come true. If we can provide the second choice to people would make more sense.

And I will learn MIT/GNU-Scheme by this way and keep maintain this project.