What is Chicken?
Chicken is an open source interpreted programming language that has a simple, minimalistic syntax influenced by Scheme. It runs on a variety of platforms and focuses on providing a practical and portable system for real world applications.
Some key features of Chicken include:
- C-like syntax to allow easy transition for programmers familiar with other languages
- Compiled for high performance despite being interpreted at runtime
- Support for extensions written in C for efficiency if needed
- Good documentation and suite of libraries for tackling common programming tasks
- Foreign Function Interface for calling code from C programs
- Portability to run on Windows, Linux, macOS and other platforms
Chicken is well-suited for introducing programming concepts due to its simplicity. The small core language and standard library allow new programmers to quickly grasp the fundamentals. At the same time, Chicken scales to handle complex, real world software engineering through its flexible extension mechanisms.