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Chicken is an instance of "Mysteryware".

* Who created it?

* Why didn't them pick one of the other implementations?

* What's the history / background?

Could not find any of the answers to those questions after a few minutes of Googling around, nor in Wikipedia [1].

Closest I got is this page [2] that list "Felix Winkelmann" as the top core contributor. I'm guessing he is the author since the name rings a bell (after dabbling a bit with scheme and comparing implementations, so maybe I read his name somewhere, probably right here at HN).

Regarding the "why", I also think I read somewhere that the idea was to implement scheme using the ideas on "Cheney on the M.T.A." [3] and later the project took off, but I don't know the details... did I just make this up? :-p... damn, really need to improve my note taking process.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHICKEN_(Scheme_implementation...

2: http://wiki.call-cc.org/maintainers

3: http://wiki.c2.com/?CheneyOnTheMta

EDIT: Found it! I think most I remember about Chicken history I read from these blog posts:

* https://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/05/02/chicken-scheme-part...

* https://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/19/chicken-scheme-spoc...




I had a plastic toy of Feathers McGraw on my desk, the evil penguin (disguised as a chicken!) from the Wallace and Gromit movie, “The Wrong Trousers.” Looking for a preliminary working title for the compiler, I used the first thing that came to my mind that day. I’m somewhat superstitious about names for software projects, and things were progressing well, so I didn’t dare to change the name.

Great!




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