Subject: Re: Please help From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/04/07 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3132490161714324@naggum.no> * paul_rudin@scientia.com | In the normal course of things I use cons rather than push, append rather | than nconc etc. because this tends to produce more maintainable, and bug- | free code. | | To be honest I'm a little confused that others are disagreeing with this. that's a clear sign there's enlightenment to be found in becoming unconfused... what people object to is the creation of garbage for no purpose, not the value of a more functional style. just as with any other resource, there is no excuse for wanton waste, but that's what you favor and you think the textbooks favor, but the latter is not quite so. textbooks are allowed to introduce complexity in steps. students are supposed to learn the full complexity of the issue through these steps, not stay at some step and not move on. you argue as if students should _not_ move on, because the complexity of the "don't wantonly waste the resources" supposedly produces less maintainable and buggier code. if I were to assume a psychological explanation for this mild delusion, it would be that you had been hurt by some mistake of this kind early on and have not quite learned to trust your skills afterwards. now, please note that even if you don't like this explanation, you should not be surprised when more experienced programmers naturally gravitate towards that kind of explanation. as you get more experience, the silly bugs created by using destructive operations in the wrong places should go away simply because that's that experience is all about. also, functional programming has enough problems being viewed as the right thing that it does not need to be associated with needless creation of garbage. that's the kind of laziness no programmer should be proud of. if nothing else, I hope you understand why people "disagree" with your view that this is about functional style. #:Erik