On Sep 9, Brian Harvey wrote:
> > "No, I don't want to get a job! I need to look good first."
>
> [...]
> But, yes, if push came to shove, and I had to choose between Scheme
> sitting around looking beautiful while Common Lisp brought home the
> bacon, vs. both Scheme and CL toiling away in the coal mines while
> nobody looks beautiful, I would proudly choose the former.
And the result is that "Scheme" *is* sitting around, looking beautiful
to people who like the 70s, and justifying every student that ever
complained about learning a language that has no connection to the
real world.
> "[Programming] Languages should be designed..." That is all ye
> know, and all ye need to know.
That sentence was supposed to be a principle for good language design
that other languages should strive to. Instead, it has been used
(together with the holy grail of "small specification") too often to
kill progress. If I were designing a programming language, I'd take
this as a clear indication that something in this philosophy is deeply
broken.
But I should really qualify that last sentence -- I should have said
"a *practical* programming language". And if "Scheme"'s goal not
practicality, then why has it been so bloated for so many years?
Is there any need for IO? Multiple return values *and* multiple
function arguments? Mutation? Numeric tower? Macros? Vectors?
Quasiquotes? `load'? It's a toy anyway.
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
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