Anthony Youngman <antli...@youngman.org.uk> writes: > On 01/09/17 15:17, Kieren MacMillan wrote: >> Hi Wol, >> >> >>> While it may sound weird. the reality is you probably didn't find >>> it too hard to learn Scheme, because you're a composer not a >>> programmer. >> >> Actually, I am a programmer: started with BASIC (and a little >> assembler language) in the early 1980s, then FORTRAN (including >> WATFIV) and APL in the late 1980s, then Java in the late 1990s, and >> a bunch of lesser languages (scripting, etc.) along the way. >> >>> Because I'm a procedural (that is. C and Fortran) programmer, it's >>> a lot harder for me to learn Scheme because it's a completely >>> different *sort* of language. >> >> I agree that it's very difficult for some procedural programmers to >> learn. I found the same thing when I taught XSL(T), which I find >> extremely intuitive, but many of my students (and programmer >> friends) find it impossible to get their mind around. > > I find the same thing with databases. So many people have their minds > stuck in the 2-D relational world, and just cannot grasp the concept > of a multi-dimensional database like Pick. Given that Pick is very > much list-based (unlike SQL which is set-based), why can't I grasp a > list-based language like Scheme? And Pick is very XML-like!
Because Scheme (like all LISP variants) does not even have a programming language. It has a clever way to write down parse trees as a computer-readable data structure, bypassing the step of coding in a programming language. That makes it brilliant for structure-preserving program manipulation and AI. > Thanks - I'll look up and understand what it does. The only snag is > that I've got 2.18.2, which doesn't like your code. That's the latest > on SuSE, and my gentoo system (which I daren't upgrade at the moment) > is even older - 2.15.12 2.15.12 is stupid: that's an early version in the unstable 2.15 branch. If your distribution lets you down, you might try installing a binary from our download page. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
