On Sep 8, Andre van Tonder wrote:
>
> I think Anglo academic culture has much less insistence on
> respectfulness, seniority, and all those stifling aspects of certain
> other cultures I have been exposed to. I am not Anglo either, but I
> tend to think this aspect of it is a good thing. [...]
This is all redundant: academia has these properties no matter where
you are, and it makes sense.
I wasn't claiming that r6rs should be considered via a by-authority
argument. Regardless of what you think of it, the r6rs authors are a
bunch of people who really know what they're talking about, and who
sat down and took their time to discuss things and write a
specification. It might be that they were wrong, but *ignoring* that
effort is just plain stupid. Note that R5 was *not* pulled apart
here, it is the R5-R5 delta that was. R6 was, OTOH, almost completely
ignored.
And what do "we" get instead? Huge amount of verbiage that goes back
to rehashing decisions that were done decades ago -- fexprs were
dug up from their grave, first class environments were suggested
(seriously!) as a solution for multiple values, `lambda' as a module
system replacement, and of course there's yet another wave of defmacro
nostalgia. Given this, it's so very unsurprising that unicode and
case sensitivity is again a hot topic. Square brackets must be
waiting just around the corner (and when they do enter the stage, I'll
wait for the "future extension" argument, which has been used so
ironically for decades too).
This is not "language politics" -- this is just absurd. If real
politics were like that, the middle east would be a big glass plate,
and we'd have headlines bringing us the recent news about the ongoing
debate on who should be blamed for killing jesus.
In some unnamed document I'm listed as saying:
"Scheme" as a language suffered loss after loss to many inferior
languages
The way things look on this list now, these losses are fully
justified. "Scheme" is like a 30-something year old "kid" who keeps
digging through and popping old zits, hoping that someday this will
make him/her have a beautiful face and win some promised beauty
contest, and screaming "No, I don't want to get a job! I need to look
good first.".
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
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