Subject: Re: What I want from my Common Lisp vendor and the Common Lisp community
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2001 21:12:06 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3208367526030969@naggum.net>

* Robert STRANDH <strandh@labri.u-bordeaux.fr>
> Hard to say.  But I do know that when I switched from Scheme to Common
> Lisp, things worked much better.  The students are very sensitive to
> credibility.  Scheme is just not credible in the eyes of the students.  I
> got into eternal discussions about speed of implementations, the
> necessity of adding your own object system, lack of required numeric
> types, etc.  When I listened to my own arguments, they did not sound
> convincing.

  This is extraordinarily interesting!  I expect serious professionals to
  see through the Scheme propaganda, but if students do it, it is great!
  There is perhaps enough material for a conformance paper on this, and if
  so, I would love to hear you speak about it.

> The ones that "get" Lisp, and especially the ones that become passionate,
> are the very best students.  People who become passionate about C or C++
> are more the ones that have a need to be members of a club at the
> exclusions of others, with no real technical reason why.

  This matches my own experience to a t.  I thought I was alone, however.

> This is all based on informal observation.  And it is average behavior,
> of course.

  Sometimes, that is all we have, but it is nonetheless interesting to hear.

///