Ekaitz's tech blog:
I make stuff at ElenQ Technology and I talk about it

In a previous post I already talked about why I consider important to donate money or time to Free Software projects.

This time I want to talk about my recent contributions to Chibi Scheme’s standard library.

Chibi Scheme is a R7RS scheme implementation that was designed to work as an extension or scripting language. It’s just a small library you can embed. That’s similar to Lua, but with a lot of parenthesis¹.

For those that are not familiar with Scheme: it’s just a programming language you should read about. You’ll probably discover all those new cool things you have in your programming language of choice are not that new².

There’s a detail I’d like to talk about, though. Contrary to other programming language definitions or standards, Scheme’s R7RS report is something you can read yourself. It’s less than 100 pages long³.

If you combine that with the design decisions that Alex Shinn (who also took part on the R7RS definition) took on Chibi Scheme, you end up with a simple programming language you can actually read.

That’s important.

You might wonder why should you care about the readability of a programming language if you are just a user. The answer is simple too: free software relies in the fact that you can audit and improve or customize it. If you are not able to read it you can’t exercise your rights by yourself and you’ll always need to rely in someone else. That’s not intrinsically bad, that’s the only solution that non-programmer users have. Programmers need to trust other people in other things as well so that’s not a major issue.

Problems come when projects get so complicated —and I mean millions-of-lines-of-code complicated here— only large companies have enough resources to tackle the task of editing the code. In those cases, software is not really free anymore, because in practice you are unable to use your rights and you can’t afford to find someone else to do it for you.

We started to get used to that, though.

Something I learned as a sculptor is the tools that fit you better are those that you made, you hacked or you get used to. As programmers, we are supposed to know how to program, so we are supposed to be able to make and hack the tools but we are deciding to get used to the ones that others built.

The first step to control your workspace, and consequently your own job is to control your tools⁴.

I’d love to say those are the reasons why I use Chibi Scheme, but that’s not totally true. I don’t know why I use it. I just like it.

Anyway, the other day I realized Chibi Scheme’s JSON parser was unable to parse Spanish accents so I was unable to control ElenQ Publishing’s book’s metadata correctly. That’s a problem.

As the language is simple, I was able to read the standard library and propose a change that would let the JSON parser use UTF-8 characters.

https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme/pull/643

During the process I checked CPython’s JSON parser implementation and I realized I could do it better adding surrogate pair support. So I decided to add it too.

https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme/pull/644

Once my changes were merged, I realized it was a good idea to keep going and add a JSON encoder, that wasn’t developed yet. So I did.

https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme/pull/648

While I was testing my JSON encoder I realized there was an issue with floating point numbers in the JSON parser. So I fixed that too.

https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme/pull/647

I also fixed some random indentation issue I found:

https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme/pull/646

I didn’t really need to do all what I did, but I did it anyway. I just wanted to keep Chibi Scheme healthy while I was opening the door to some future contributions. Now I have a little bit more control on my tooling, and I feel more comfortable with the fact that I might need to make some changes on Chibi’s code in the future.

It doesn’t need to be perfect, neither. I’m sure it isn’t, because I didn’t write C code since I was at university and I had zero experience working on Chibi-Scheme’s internals. My code was just enough to make the features happen, now with Alex’s changes the code is running fine and everyone can benefit from this.

So, the message I take from this can be summarized in these points:

• Use tools you can read and edit like Chibi Scheme or even CPython, which is a large codebase but is surprisingly easy to read.
• Programming languages (or their stdlib) should never be considered something untouchable. Touch them, change them, make them fit your needs.
• Don’t be afraid of tackling something that may seem hard on the first look.
• You don’t have to be perfect.
• Spend time and energy on stuff that matters.

Hope all this —the post and the code— is useful.

Being useful is the greatest goal of an engineer, after all.

Take care.