Re: scheme seems neater

From: Frode Vatvedt Fjeld (frodef_at_cs.uit.no)
Date: 04/13/04 

Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 20:17:37 +0200

Cameron MacKinnon <cmackin+nn@clearspot.net> writes:

> No, I haven't. I haven't started studying macrology yet, so I only
> know from what I've read. And I have no reason to believe my
> experience won't eventually be like everyone else's: Learn to avoid
> the traps, and spend many years with no problems at all.
>
> Or at least I'll remember my experience just as others do - "Nope,
> never had a problem that I can remember." It is human nature to
> forget our mistakes and remember our triumphs.

So you come in as a neopythe, insisting that there are problems that
you have yet to experience yourself, and which old-timers claim do not
exist. You conclude that the old-timers must display some mental
flaw. I hope you can forgive me for suggesting that such behavior is
perhaps slightly ridiculous.

> But if the computer can solve the problem so that I don't have to
> worry about it, and if I don't lose any power with the new solution,
> then my vote is for progress. If a language can help amateurs or
> newbies avoid mistakes without taking power away from advanced
> users, why not?

Why not is what I tried to explain below. The language would become a
mess, and "solve" extremely little. I believe such an addition to CL
would be much, much more likely to increase the learning threshold for
newbies than decrease it, all things considered.

> Well, CL already has enough clutter [..]

I strongly disagree with this statement, if you mean to imply that CL
has significant amounts of unnecessary operators and/or concepts.

> [..] that a little bit more couldn't hurt, [..]

And regardless of the truthfulness of your previous statement, this
statement I also strongly disagree with, at least so long as the
benefits of the clutter are unclear.

> [..] and the Scheme mindset is such that they've probably set a hard
> upper limit of 75 pages on their language spec. :-) [OK, OK, it
> isn't really fair to exclude SRFIs.]
>
> But, oddly enough, it seems that classical Lisp has stopped evolving
> with CL, while Scheme continues to mutate.

What is really odd is that schemers, who appear to be obsessed with
keeping the size of the language spec small and only standardize the
absolutely most technically fundamental operators[*], eagerly advocate
the addition of what to me appears to be a whole new sub-language just
to solve some very minor problem. Well, of course, in a lisp-1, it's
not so minor, but still.

I'd be happy to see Common Lisp evolve, but not just for the sake of
evolving, and certainly not for "solving" non-existing problems. Maybe
the case is that Common Lisp as it stands is actually useful, and its
community is all busy doing actual useful programming, confident that
their platform of choice won't randomly mutate under their feet for
obscure reasons.

Also, I disagree with the notion that CL doesn't evolve. There's lots
of things happening. But that doesn't mean the language standard is
necessarily ripe for "modernization".

[*] "technically fundamental" as opposed to "fundamental", for example
    because Scheme dismisses the IMHO very fundamental difference
    between the operator and variable name-spaces, just because it's
    technically feasible to do so. 

-- 
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld

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