On Sep 9, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
> On 9 Sep 2009, at 5:59 pm, Eli Barzilay wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Pessimism! I've seen much good practical work done in Scheme. Not
> very much, I agree, but certainly not none...
Note that I wrote "Scheme", not Scheme.
> The main reason for Scheme not being more widespread is one of
> public image, rather than truth.
The flaws that are demonstrated by re-opening decade-old debates are
more than just issues of public image. (Think about a manager
deciding what language to use for a project: given these rehashings,
would you consider "Scheme"?)
> As it stands, there are languages called [...].
Right -- and some of these things are *far* from being just a matter
of writing (foo) instead of (bar). For example, in PLT there are
custodians that are in charge of resources like memory, threads, and
ports; they are extremely useful for writing robust servers -- and
there is no way to write some quick text that will replace a PLT
(custodian-shutdown-all c). Same goes for many other things.
> We need to keep it beautiful, because that makes programming more
> productive. But that's in no way contradictory to making it
> practical.
Yes, of course there is no contradiction between the two. But you
need to accept that more features means a bigger spec, and you need to
accept that this does *not* mean less beautiful. This obsession with
a 50-page limit for the spec is suffocating the language (and the
post-r6rs noise is a perfect example of this). The same goes for
accepting compromises -- a more practical language means that there
are more compromising to do, and r6rs actually went through these.
This is very different from r5rs (and earlier) where the solution to a
problem that requires compromising was to just not include it (and
pray that the One True Solution will present itself to us in the next
decade(s)).
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
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