On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Abdulaziz Ghuloum <[email protected]> wrote: > So, I agree with Derick. The focus should be on the portable libraries > not the diverging unportable behaviors.
Derick and Aziz, I understand your position, which is absolutely reasonable, but I think you misunderstood my goals and my intended target of readers. >From "Adventure #1", first section, "My target": """ .... learning Scheme is not trivial: actually it takes of lot of effort and motivation to master it. If you see a programming language just as a tool to perform a given job in the smallest possible time, and your job is not programming language research, then you should not learn Scheme. Scheme is for people who want to know the many possible ways of performing the same job, who want to understand the advantages and the disadvantages of the different approaches, who want to explore programming paradigms. """ The subtitle of my blog is "The Explorer": the Adventures are for adventurous people who want to travel uncharted territory and see different ways of thinking. The approach I wanted to follow should have been clear from the beginning. The first 12 episodes were intended as an introduction to the rest, the serious stuff. Starting from episode 13 I am already discussing advanced stuff, like functional programming, pattern matching, streams etc. You can notice that the recent episodes have had very few comments on Artima, which I interpret as having lost many readers since the series is becoming tough to read. That's fine. I am not writing a commercial book, it will never become a bestseller and I knew my target of readers was small from the beginning. But this is not relevant. I think there are many important things about Scheme which are not common knowledge and deserve to be written down in a lighter form than the R6RS report. So I am writing them out for the few people that will find them useful. I agree that the community would need a document describing the module system in the simplest possible way. However, the Adventures were never intended to be such a document. Their goal is to make people aware of the various pitfalls, not to present the easy way only. Actually, I have already presented the easy way; from the introduction to episode 20: """ Fortunately the module system works well enough for most simple cases. The proof is that we introduced the R6RS module system in episode 5, and for 15 episode we could go on safely by just using the basic import/export syntax. However, once nontrivial macros enters in the game, things are not easy anymore. """ The easy part of the Adventures is done; people who were not really interested in Scheme are already gone; the rest of the series is for the real adventures!
