Re: Shootout Stuff

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Lo, on Tuesday, April 9, Bill Wood did write:

> For example, I am more productive using mzscheme+emacs than I am using
> Drscheme (and I hope that in the effort to keep Drscheme "modern" the
> PLT developers don't forget to keep the command line interface equally
> tool-rich for those of us who really don't cotton to WIMP interfaces).

Second the motion!  There are some features of DrScheme that are awfully
nice, though, like the alpha-rename.  (Again, I haven't used DrScheme
since about v102; I did promise to look at it over Easter weekend, but
that weekend got swallowed by a forced Debian upgrade.  Ah, well.)

> BTW, has anyone read Neil Stephenson's (I think -- the author of
> Cryptonomicon) little essay on contemporary computing?  I think the
> title is "It All Started With the Command Line", and he has some
> interesting, if wildly controversial, thoughts on this subject.

The essay you're referring to is ``In the Beginning Was the Command
Line'' by Neal Stephenson, and you can find a copy on the web at
<http://cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html>, although there's a
nicely-formatted HTML version that Doug Orleans saved; you can get a
copy off his web page at <http://www.ccs.neu.edu/~dougo>--the link's
toward the bottom.

Back on the original topic, I have to say that code readability is so
subjective that discussing a particular code fragment's readability is
not likely to be worth the time.  I recently had a discussion with a
co-worker about whether an XML document or its s-expression equivalent
is more readable: he preferred the first; I went with the second.
There's really no absolute answer.

Richard