Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

Hoot just dropped v0.7.0, and the comments lit up like a dev forum on Friday night. It runs Scheme—a minimalist, brainy programming language—right inside your browser via WebAssembly (a way to run fast, non-JavaScript code on the web). Built on Guile, it’s a self-contained toolchain with its own tester. Translation: no extra downloads, just hoot and go.

The crowd’s split. One camp is giddy: “This is what JavaScript was supposed to be,” cried the nostalgia squad, recalling the 90s lore that JS once flirted with Scheme-like ideas before corporate gravity yanked it toward C-style syntax. Another camp threw shade: “Love the project, but Guile? Meh.” Meanwhile, the practical folks barged in: can it run on Cloudflare Workers (those server-side, all-over-the-world web functions)? If Hoot plays nice there, expect hacker fireworks.

Then came the big brain vibes: one commenter predicted a future where AI agents write most code, pushing languages to be more explicit, less playful, and more machine-friendly. Cue memes about “the working-class language” of tomorrow and jokes about JS hearing a loud hoot from across the web. With Wasm’s garbage collection (automatic memory clean-up) now in the mix, people are seeing doors open for weird, wonderful browser apps—and arguments that are just as spicy.