Re: Scheme acceptance [no flames]

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu>]

Leo,

> I _absolutely_ agree with every single point you made in your
> response. You should not advocate Scheme to me.

I think you misunderstood my message.  I am not advocating Scheme at
all.  I'm merely explaining why some things are the way they are, and
why some things would be very hard to change.

> Also a language is as good as the libraries it provides. 

Yes, we know.  That's why we've been implementing more and more
libraries.  But we also prefer to do them to a reasonable degree of
correctness, faithfulness to the standards, and with reasonable
interfaces.  This, again, is not something other language library
developers care about as much (even in Guile).  This gives them better 
time-to-market.

>     SK>   Paul Fernhout has been playing with a new Scheme syntax.  Hopefully
>     SK>   he will respond with some notification of its status.  I should
>     SK>   warn, though, that lots of people have tried to come up with a
>     SK>   better syntax for Scheme (including, blush, Matthias and I).  I've
>     SK>   never seen a success (ditto).
> 
> How about Dylan? 

Dylan eventually ditched the infix syntax.  And I'm not sure that
while it existed, Dylan's infix syntax had the "Trojan Horse" appeal
of Java's infix syntax.  At least, there is no evidence for that in
the form of market share.

>     SK>   The rarely-understood detail about Scheme is the beauty of the
>     SK>   tail-call.
>
> I beleive that tail-call is very well understood and
> appreciated. That is exactly why ad hock languages, which pretend to
> provide functional programming features, suck that much. For
> example, neither Perl nor Python have proper tail recursion even
> though it is possible to implement.

I believe your first sentence is contradicted by the next two.  Maybe
you're being sarcastic?  Anyway, it doesn't matter.

> Well, I understand that you folks in academia do not care much about
> marketing and public relations but in the "big, ugly world" there is
> a comon preception that the first stable release is "1.0". 

Frankly, Leo, I really, really, really don't think the reason Scsh
didn't catch on as a major scripting shell is its version numbering.

Anwyay, PLT Scheme is at v103.  That should make someone in the big,
ugly world very happy.  Yet I've seen slashdot posts that make fun of
our version numbering too.

I think we have more interesting and important things to discuss.

Shriram