RE: peasant revolt against DrScheme!

[Brent Fulgham <brent.fulgham@xpsystems.com>]

> To the students, it must seem they've got a legitimate beef. 
> If you consider that most of them will not go on to graduate school.
> To the student, with the present state of affairs, it no doubt
> appears that they will not have much opportunity to use Scheme for
> their future programming tasks in industry.
>

Yes, but what we often forget is:

1.  Any decent engineer is capable of learning a new language in a
relatively short period of time.
2.  The amount of real programming experience learned in your typical
C/C++ course does not really prepare you for a job in industry.  It
takes time and practice to become proficient, so if I see a resume
for someone with a 1 or 2-semester course in C++ but no outside
experience, and one from someone who took Scheme in school but has
written some interesting open-source software in C/C++ over a period
of time, I am more impressed with the latter than the former.
 
> I can only support this anecdotally:
> 1. I recieved bad marks on my last review because I had planned to
> write the UI for my test tool using MrEd.  My manager objected that
> it was too difficult to maintain code written in a "non standard
> language". (I'm still pissed.)
>

That's terrible.  Did you actually *implement* in Scheme?  I can't
understand
getting a bad review for just _planning_ something.  New ideas are important
to the growth of a business.  This is very distressing.
 
> 2. Scheme is *not* a resume item. HR departments sort resumes based on
> certain key words like: VB, C/C++, Java, XML et al. The typical
> interview loop at a software company (I've been through several and
> have given several) usually involves answering one or more stupid logic
> puzzles, as well as writing some routine in C/C++.
> 

Ah.  The stupid "How many gas stations are there in the United States"
question?

> I quote Matthais:
> "Programming languages change faster than some students' t-shirts."
> 
> This is *not* a rhetorical question:
> How do you tell someone that most programming languages are fads, but
> that Scheme isn't?
> 
> The reason I put this forward as a real question, is because 
> I'm frequently in the position where I am promoting or defending
> Scheme and this *comes up.*
> 

This is an excellent question.  For instance, I just lost an argument at
work regarding the direction our new platform will be taking.  One group
wanted to code in VB and VB-script, the others using Java/C++ with scripting
available in a variety of standardized, open, available languages such
as Perl (for the most part, but also making Scheme a possibility).

Of course we lost, because these decisions are made by people who are
easily swayed by market hype, sparkly things, and bright lights.  But I'm
bitter, so am probably being unfair.  There are also market realities, but
I think they are far weaker now than they were even a year ago which should
make new technologies (or older ones like Scheme) more viable options.

-Brent