Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:16:28 -0400, Douglas Alan wrote:
>> Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >>> On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 17:46:35 -0400, Douglas Alan wrote: >> The problem with using Scheme for real work is that it doesn't come >> with enough batteries included and there isn't a big enough of a >> community behind it that uses it for real work. > And yet there have been so many millions of dollars put into > developing Lisp... > I guess this is another example of perfection being the enemy of the > good. That's probably a valid criticism of Scheme. Not so much of Lisp in general. The reason that Common Lisp hasn't been widely adopted outside of the AI community, for instance, has more to do with most programmers apparently not understanding the joys of Cambridge Polish Notation. Also, Lisp was garbage-collected back when garbage-collection had a bad name, due to it being considered a resource hog. And then a large part of the Lisp community decided to concentrate on building special hardware (i.e. Lisp machines) for developing Lisp applications, rather than making good Lisp development environments for Fortran/C machines (i.e., all normal computers). It was clear to me at the time that it's a very hard sell to convince people to buy expensive hardware to develop in a programming language that hasn't yet been popularized. But apparently what was obvious to me was not so apparent to those who dreamed of IPO riches. > All that development into Lisp/Scheme to make it the best, purest, > most ideal programming language, with such flexibility and > extensibility. that nobody wants to use it. You can write any > library and macro system you need, but nobody has. Lisp in general has had all sorts of fancy macro packages for it since the dawn of time. But Lisp wasn't really standardized until Common Lisp in the early '80s. CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System), which is implemented via macros entirely within Common Lisp itself, was completed in the latter half of the '80s. > I don't mean literally nobody, of course. Its a figure of > speech. But it seems that people tend to program in Scheme for fun, > or to stretch the boundaries of what's possible, and not to Get The > Job Done. Well, most implementations don't have batteries included, the way that Python does. Guile attempts to, as does the Scheme Shell, but for various reasons they didn't catch on the way that Python and Perl and Ruby have. >> Well, go to MIT and take SICP and then the graduate-level sequel to >> the class, Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming, and then >> you'll see what some of the advantages would be. > Are you suggesting that the only way to see the advantages of Scheme > is to do a university course? No, I was just suggesting *one* way of seeing the light. I think, though, that it's probably difficult to grasp why Scheme is so interesting without taking a good class or two on the topic. Not that acquiring insight on one's own is impossible, but most people would also have a hard time seeing why group theory or linear algebra are really interesting without taking good classes one the subjects. Python doesn't really require taking a class in it because it's really very similar to many other programming languages. So if you already know any of the others, Python is very easy to pick up. Scheme, on the other hand, is more of a departure from what most people would already be comfortable with. >> A good multimethod system, e.g., would make Python a significantly nicer >> language for my purposes, for instance. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimethod#Python Sure, you can do it in Python, but I bet that it's neither very fun, nor efficient. >> For the record, I have a huge problem with NIH-syndrome, and think that >> every programming language in the world could learn a thing or two from >> what other languages have gotten right. > Of course. And Python, more than most, has shamelessly copied > features from other languages. To make myself a bit more clear, I don't think that Python suffers all that much from NIH. On the other hand, I think that many people in discussion forums in general often do. Here being no exception. > So the question is, are Scheme macros one of those things that > "other languages have gotten right"? Could they be a case of > over-generalization? Or somewhere in between? I don't know of any language that is not a dialect of Lisp that has a good syntax extension mechanism. Lisp dialects tend to get it right, more or less, but solving the issue is much more difficult for any language that doesn't have a Lisp-like syntax. Lisp's syntax is particularly amenable to syntax extension. |>oug -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
