Re: [BLUG] scheme programming

I forgot to add that there is a GNU implementation of Scheme.

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 9:45 AM, Steve Beckley <harthacnut@gmail.com> wrote:

I took that class last year.  I didn't think it was very good.  As far as I know Scheme is largely worthless.  The only things I know of that it's used in is GIMP and a few programs that model evolution.  You will never use it in another computer science class at IU, either.  That said, it is a good language to learn on in that it is simple and is an excellent way to learn the fundamentals.

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 9:35 AM, Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:

I'm taking the intro to computer science course at IU and we are learning to program with Scheme.  I have no experience in programming (well, if you don't count playing around with Basic in high school) and was wondering what languages anyone on this list starting learning on.  I know it isn't the specific language you learn but the fundamentals that matter, but I'm also wondering if Scheme is used often in specific applications or where is it used in the wild?

Oh, and another thing I've been thinking about on this class.  There is a strict no sharing your code policy with anyone.  Our first assignment is really basic so I can see where sharing something like

;least compares 2 numbers and prints the smallest
(define least
  (lambda (x y)
    (min x y)))

would make it easy to cheat.  But as we will get more complicated I think that sharing code is a good way to learn how others solve the same problem.  Maybe because I'm really into the open source community that I feel that a University would surely want to encourage a more open approach to coding?  And we also use an implementation called Chez Scheme, which is proprietary.  Aren't there some good open source implementations?  What do you all think?

Ben

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