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+Title: ElenQ Donations — Chibi Scheme
+Date: 2020-05-31
+Categories: Series
+Tags: ElenQ Donations
+Slug: donations-chibi-02
+Lang: en
+Summary: Donation to Chibi Scheme programming language
+
+> Read all the posts about [ElenQ Donations here]({tag}elenq-donations).
+
+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 parenthesis[^1].
+
+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 new[^2].
+
+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 long[^3].
+
+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 tools[^4].
+
+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](http://en.goteo.org/project/elenq-publishing) 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](https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/json/decoder.py#L117)
+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.
+
+[^1]: And no `end`-s. Less typing for sure: good for your hands.
+
+[^2]: And maybe not that cool neither.
+
+[^3]: I'm not going to talk about the implications of that fact. It's obvious
+  there must be some kind of trade-off comparing to other standards that are
+  more than one thousand pages long. I'll just recommend you to read it, it's
+  pretty good: <https://small.r7rs.org/attachment/r7rs.pdf>
+
+[^4]: In fact, that's the second. I'm supposing we all know what we are doing.