At best we’d get a lot more people who are excited to participate but loose interest once they realize they have no idea how to write a program to parse the opposing bot.
At worst that is what would happen.
Java and Python are many orders of magnitude more popular than Scheme and if only 10% of the people who get excited about participating actually know how to parse than we would still have much greater numbers.
Java and Python are many orders of magnitude more popular than Scheme and if only 10% of the people who get excited about participating actually know how to parse than we would still have much greater numbers.
Java and Python are much harder to parse than scheme, and the percentage of Java or Python programers who could write a parser for those languages is less than 10%. Furthermore, the ones who could write a parser likely also know Scheme or at least some other lisp dialect.
Do you have any evidence of this? It seems highly unlikely that the proportion of users of any given programming language that could write a parser would differ by an amount that there are more Scheme users who can write a parser than Java/Python users, given the vastly larger number of users of Java and Python.
For what its worth, python includes its own parser in the standard library, so it would probably be better than scheme in that regard, though I might have to agree with you regarding parsing with Java, though there may very well be a module out there for parsing Java as well.
From experience, I can tell you that it is easier to lean Scheme and write a Scheme interpreter than it is to just understand how Python works on the inside. If you know how Python worked well enough to do static analysis on it, you can learn Scheme in an hour.
At worst that is what would happen.
Java and Python are many orders of magnitude more popular than Scheme and if only 10% of the people who get excited about participating actually know how to parse than we would still have much greater numbers.
Java and Python are much harder to parse than scheme, and the percentage of Java or Python programers who could write a parser for those languages is less than 10%. Furthermore, the ones who could write a parser likely also know Scheme or at least some other lisp dialect.
Do you have any evidence of this? It seems highly unlikely that the proportion of users of any given programming language that could write a parser would differ by an amount that there are more Scheme users who can write a parser than Java/Python users, given the vastly larger number of users of Java and Python.
For what its worth, python includes its own parser in the standard library, so it would probably be better than scheme in that regard, though I might have to agree with you regarding parsing with Java, though there may very well be a module out there for parsing Java as well.
From experience, I can tell you that it is easier to lean Scheme and write a Scheme interpreter than it is to just understand how Python works on the inside. If you know how Python worked well enough to do static analysis on it, you can learn Scheme in an hour.