Subject: Re: New Lisp ? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 19:30:59 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.functional Message-ID: <3218556655720190@naggum.net> * Sander Vesik | Lots of people spend lots of time looking at a sea of program - usually a | sea of program they didn't write. And this can be for a wide number of | reasons, whetever to find or fix a bug or enhance some section. I used to be doing that for a living, while I still thought C was cool. Certain kinds of bugs stand out from the source like bad spelling. But some people do not see spelling mistakes, so make a lot of them and need machine help to signal them to their visual system, like wavy red lines. This is not how you learn to spell correctly. It is as bad as singing off key and having a computer beep back at you until you no longer get it wrong in _its_ view -- it can never get _good_ that way. I also think programmers who need color to see their code need to drop the keyboard and pick up some crayons -- if color helps, it is _not_ a good thing. Whatever your language is, if you cannot scan it quickly or slowly as your needs require, you are not a production quality programmer, yet, or maybe you are not reading production quality code written by another immature specimen. If the goal is to increase the number of production quailty programmers, you train them, reward them when they get closer to that goal and get rid of those who refuse to improve when necessary. Rewarding incompetence and ignorance increases the number of incompetent programmers. Designing programming languages and tools so incompetent programmers can feel better about themselves is not the way to go. /// -- The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture has taught you. Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are more important to you than those in your past ever will be. The world is changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.