This may be old hat to some, but I just saw this short essay on Reddit and thought it was interesting. From 2000, the author writes about having used Scheme to design a C program that he could not have written from scratch.
It also reminded me of some of the ideas from HtDP about programming as algebra and "the importance of a structured, systematic approach to programming". Perhaps not coincidentally, the author is/was a grad student under Dan Friedman, sometimes co-author with Matthias Felleisen. It makes me eager to get back to learning Racket. « What I had been learning in my Programming Language course, however, was that I really could manage my own control flow if I wanted. Furthermore, I could start with a simpler, more naive program and basically DERIVE the sophisticated one through a series of correctness-preserving program transformations. This is where Scheme really won. Because of its extremely algorithmic---almost mathematical---nature, Scheme can be easily manipulated in a sort of algebraic style. One can follow a series of rewrite rules (just about blindly) to transform a program into another form with some desirable property. This was exactly what I needed. » "Is Scheme Faster than C?" http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt found via http://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/d7h3j/ _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
