4 ms·

Before down-voting this poor soul: Hobbyist programmer, Schemer (although not smug about it, really), gamer, voracious reader, and highschool student.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I did say if you had to. In the industry, I can understand why you might have to learn it. I just don't understand why you'd want to. But then, I never liked Java: maybe I just don't "get it".
- ddorian43 10y ago
  Many of the 'big data' tools are in java. If you want to extend them or even just use them you'll need it(~hbase, apache samza, lucene/solr/elasticsearch etc)
- TurboHaskal 10y ago
  I highly dislike Java as well but as a professional and somewhat pragmatic programmer I'd be extremely wary of discouraging a fellow developer to learn such a dominant language like Java. Worry not, your Scheme kool-aid will fade out eventually.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    That's a fair criticism. Hell, I'll probably have to learn Java sooner or later, like it or not. >Worry not, your Scheme kool-aid will fade out eventually It's not Kool-Aid. I can tell because I am still capable of criticising Scheme, and am not in awe of it. Scheme has a weak stdlib (which is both good and bad), its string handling is painful at best, as srfi-13 doesn't provide a lot of common functionality, its function names are painfully long (call-with-current-continuation. Really? What would you call 'do' if you hadn't inherited it from maclisp? iterate-over-variables-incrementing-until-condition?) Which matters a lot when your whole language is made up of them, or things that look like them (how many times do you want to type 'vector-ref'?). Scheme has no dynamic variables. Chicken, my scheme of choice, and the most viable one for real work, lacks a decent debugger. Gambit and Guile have good debuggers, but Guile is slow, and Gambit has no libraries, so you can't get anything done. Schemestill doesn't have a standard imperative macro system. And the SSC is still working on R7RS-large, which will finally bring together a stdlib large enough to write scheme portable across implementations without snapping and spending the rest of your life in a corner, dribbling about syntax-rules. I like scheme: it's both syntactically and semantically small, beautifully clean, and even decent for some kinds of real work. But it's not even close to perfect, or even ready for industry.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I did say if you had to. In the industry, I can understand why you might have to learn it. I just don't understand why you'd want to. But then, I never liked Java: maybe I just don't "get it".

ddorian43 10y ago
Many of the 'big data' tools are in java. If you want to extend them or even just use them you'll need it(~hbase, apache samza, lucene/solr/elasticsearch etc)
TurboHaskal 10y ago
I highly dislike Java as well but as a professional and somewhat pragmatic programmer I'd be extremely wary of discouraging a fellow developer to learn such a dominant language like Java. Worry not, your Scheme kool-aid will fade out eventually.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  That's a fair criticism. Hell, I'll probably have to learn Java sooner or later, like it or not. >Worry not, your Scheme kool-aid will fade out eventually It's not Kool-Aid. I can tell because I am still capable of criticising Scheme, and am not in awe of it. Scheme has a weak stdlib (which is both good and bad), its string handling is painful at best, as srfi-13 doesn't provide a lot of common functionality, its function names are painfully long (call-with-current-continuation. Really? What would you call 'do' if you hadn't inherited it from maclisp? iterate-over-variables-incrementing-until-condition?) Which matters a lot when your whole language is made up of them, or things that look like them (how many times do you want to type 'vector-ref'?). Scheme has no dynamic variables. Chicken, my scheme of choice, and the most viable one for real work, lacks a decent debugger. Gambit and Guile have good debuggers, but Guile is slow, and Gambit has no libraries, so you can't get anything done. Schemestill doesn't have a standard imperative macro system. And the SSC is still working on R7RS-large, which will finally bring together a stdlib large enough to write scheme portable across implementations without snapping and spending the rest of your life in a corner, dribbling about syntax-rules. I like scheme: it's both syntactically and semantically small, beautifully clean, and even decent for some kinds of real work. But it's not even close to perfect, or even ready for industry.