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As a programmer who've used Lisp and Scheme for commercial projects, I object to that, although I admit there's a tendency in the circles of these languages tha
by shiro 19y ago
As a programmer who've used Lisp and Scheme for commercial projects, I object to that, although I admit there's a tendency in the circles of these languages that pursue ideals obsessibly.
However, "turtles all the way down" has also very practical implications. I have been saved more than once because Lisp/Scheme have the way to tweak very low-level stuff within it so that I can tune the whole program to meet the performance requirements without changing the large structure of the program. And don't take the Scheme guy's discussion about Elegance by their word---we know that tools of day-to-day jobs has to have a kind of dirtiness (I don't despise that; in fact, I rather like to play with lower bits, UI, or legacy workflow,...). We only believe that keeping an eye on the ideal will serve as a long-term guide.
- davidw 19y agoI don't mean that everyone is that obsessed; suffice it to say that enough people have the mentality that they want their entire environment to be in Lisp/Scheme/Smalltalk (the last of which is pretty much that way by design) to have created a culture that is, on average, more concerned with that kind of thing than the scripting languages were - they were too busy getting things done, piggybacking on Unix, C, and Windows to some degree. Note that the Java people have also gone in big for 'turtles all the way down', but that's easier with millions of Sun dollars at your back. My point wasn't that Scheme/Lisp/etc... are impractical languages, or unusable for real work, but more along the lines of "ok, these are great languages, languages that have changed the way everyone thought - so why aren't they more popular? What went wrong?" One very specific example - I recall fooling around with Scheme a while ago, and the implementation I was using didn't even have a string-split (string -> list). Easy to implement? Sure, but also evidence that it wasn't being used for the sort of practical things I wanted to do with it.
- shiro 19y agoYour point taken. If you feel to taste Scheme again, check out mine http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/ http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/ . It has string-split :) Seriously, it aims at being a handy tool for day-to-day scripting.