On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 10:56:09AM -0600, Lawrence Bottorff wrote: > I'm your typical newbie who is hand-wringing over what direction to go in > the general functional programming world. Lisp, Scheme, or Haskell? > > Of late I've been trying to get through the Barski book, "Land of Lisp," > but I'm really seeing now why Scheme was created: CL seems to have a ton of > gnarl that is part-functional, part-whatever, leaving me wondering and > neurotic. And so I'm trying to understand some esoteric, arcane Lisp > printing/file management weirdness -- which I'm told is not proper > functional style -- after I've just been introduced to yet another CL map > variation, after (funcall thunk). So I guess I'd like your advice vis-a-vis > Racket. Q: Is Racket "cleaner," or is full of pork too? Or have I just got > the wrong book for a beginner? > > I understand that Barski is slavishly following the "let's get real stuff > done" philosophy, but I'm not up to speed with functional yet to even know > what's going on. Is your "Realm of Racket" better at this? I feel like I'm > spinning my wheels at this point. . . . > > LB
I should mention that another, quite different approach to functional programming is the language OCAML. See http://ocaml.org/ for details. I program using Scheme and OCAML as high-level languages. By the way, I don't do exclusively pure functional programming. Most of my code is functional, but I use imperative mechanisms when apppropriate. I consider that building real systems as pure functional code is extremism bordering on masochism. -- hendrik ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users