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.