What do I need to do to get paid to Scheme?

Question

I'm a big fan of functional programming in general, Schemes in particular, and PLT-Racket ideally. I am wondering what concrete steps are likely to get me into a position where coding Scheme (or some functional language) is the bulk of the work.

I'm actually quite interested in academia, but on the other hand, I don't feel like I necessarily have what it takes (at least not at the moment) to do a top-tier Ph.D in CS. I definitely would prefer to have some real-world experience putting complex systems together in Scheme either way. Does anyone have any advice for an aspiring Schemer?

Answer 1

Start writing some Scheme libraries, then blog about the libraries you've wrote, get noticed in the community.

This will always give you leverage when applying for a position, employers like to have some evidence of what you can do.

Answer 2

dalton has the right idea; you want to build something you can show off. To find out about needs, you could go to http://srfi.schemers.org/, which is an archive of proposals for Scheme libraries and other improvements to Scheme, and see what you think you can contribute to. Or make contact with the Racket team; you may be able to contribute to Racket directly.

Answer 3

F# is getting popular in the finance sector:

http://cs.hubfs.net/forums/thread/16004.aspx

Answer 4

If you want to leverage something popular and in the news: App Inventor is based on Google Blocks, which are in turn based on Kawa, which is a Scheme dialect [*].

If you can show off your skills by putting together blocks and making them available for the community...it's a natural way to take advantage both of your multi-language skills and something currently getting press coverage.

Regards, Dak [*] and I forgot to say that earlier, mea culpa!