Subject: Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1997/02/28 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme Message-ID: <3066118552736104@naggum.no> * Erik Naggum | (Scheme, in contrast, gives me the feeling that this kind of "grunt | work" is _not_ bad -- Scheme programmers implement complex stuff with | basic buildings blocks over and over, it seems.) * Paul Schaaf | I'm trying to learn Scheme--I'm almost finished with SICP--but I don't | understand your statement. Could you elaborate? the lack of generalized functionality and the general low-level standard substrate of Scheme means that you need to implement a very large number of functions that are already there in Common Lisp. that is, this is true if you program in Scheme, not in some particular Scheme _implementation_ or Scheme + some non-standard library. SICP doesn't teach you Scheme as much as it teaches you to think in terms consonant with the computer, and I firmly believe that programmers need to implement low-level stuff to learn how they work and how to use them, but I draw a sharp line between learning and working; learning is a continuous progression through new material, while working is mostly repeating a large number of already well-known tasks as a means to create something new or learn something so new that nobody can teach you. it's the repetitive part of work in "real life" that I find to be "grunt work", and which I want to minimize. #\Erik -- if you think big enough, you never have to do it