Subject: Re: Your introduction to Lisp... From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 18:34:12 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3227366070034150@naggum.net> * Tim Moore | In this context, the periodic assertions that "Scheme is not Lisp," | "Scheme ruins you for Common Lisp," "The Scheme community is hostile | to the Common Lisp community" etc. always seem bizzare to me. In 1986 | it was clear that Scheme was the teaching language, Common Lisp was | the language in which you'd write real programs, and most of the | concepts were the same. But this is only true when you look at Common Lisp from Scheme. If you look at Scheme from Common Lisp, it is most of the concepts are missing, if not different. It is actually very important to realize this. What does rot the brain is that those who actually think that "most of the concepts are the same" are damaged for life, because they never go beyond what they have already learned. Essentially, they write Scheme in Common Lisp for the rest of their lives, just like some people write Pascal in any language, or Fortran in any language. This is precisely why _not_ exposing a malleable young mind to Scheme is so important if they are ever going to use Common Lisp for production programming. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief. Post with compassion: http://home.chello.no/~xyzzy/kitten.jpg