Subject: Re: Can I use Lisp? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 26 Oct 2000 23:46:59 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3181592819799881@naggum.net> * Fernando Rodríguez -> glauber | Scheme was designed as a teaching and investigation tool, not for | "real world" programming. The problem with tools that are only good for the teaching/learning process is that they are actually teaching many very bad things amidst all the good stuff. It is good to learn how to build your own tools. It is bad to learn that you have to, meaning that you are more likely to spend a lot of time building something that is already out there rather than try to understand it and use it. It is good to learn recursion instead of iteration because it expands the way you think in ways those who don't grasp recursion cannot fathom. It is bad _not_ to learn iteration and when it is a good thing, when it is more readable and understandable than recursion, and above all, when recursion would kill you performance-wise and iteration would not. It's just like the irrational gotophobia that some students of programming have (no real programmer _fears_ goto) because they have never actually seen the hell and spaghetti code that they have been saved from by structured programming. | As a learning language it has been far more successful that CL as a | general purpose language. :-P Hmpf! But this probably _is_ true. Scheme succeeds because it is easy to teach to bright people and fun to implement. Hence, we have about a million implementations of Scheme, and only one of them is good for anything more than teaching others how to implement Scheme. #:Erik -- I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to death your right to say it. -- Tom Stoppard