Re: scheme - my opinion

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: At a guess, I would think that Emacs Lispy people would (in general) feel more comfortable switching over to Common Lisp than to Scheme. There are many subtle (and not so subtle) differences between Emacs Lisp and CL, but I'd think that many elisp people have gotten used to having those handy functions and macros that cl.el provides. Anyway. Few would argue that Scheme isn't more ideologically pure, but I dislike cleanliness. Common Lisp is a great, towering beast, but you don't have to be familiar with even a fraction of it to get lots of mileage out of it. And as you learn more, you find that it's basically all there. The problem with Scheme is that's there's generally nothing there, so you have to write all the code yourself, which means that you get a gazillion little functions that work their way into the code base, all functions with their own little peculiarites, which (in the end) means that Scheme turns out to be even bigger than Common Lisp. (How big is Guile now?) With Common Lisp one gets a language environment that is reasonably standard -- you can expect books like CLtL2, commercial environments like Allegro, free environments like CLISP, and (oh, joy of joys) an Emacs that one would know how to use if one was familiar with any of the others. Besides, Scheme doesn't have `when'. One can't not have `when'. Scheme is therefore unusable. So *there*. -- (domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.) larsi(a)ifi.uio.no * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen