Re: [BLUG] scheme programming

scheme is beloved by academics, especially at IU. I'm not aware of
any application that I use that is written in it. (that's not to say
that there aren't any, but I do feel that it has weak support among
programmers who are actually trying to accomplish things and not a
more philosophical appreciation of programming.) If it has a
stronghold, I suspect it's in research, especially Artificial
Intelligence research.

Making this more sad: I agree with the general precept of "it isn't
the specific language..", but I find the LISP family to be pretty far
removed from just about everything else. particularly nowadays when
so many things are so object oriented (and although I believe in OO I
find in non-intuitive in many ways) it's a bit disappointing to me
that they are using scheme for an intro course. Of course, the most
likely alternative is java, and I don't like that either, so... Idk.
At least java looks a lot like most other languages.

Having said all of that, you'll still get into a programming mindset
learning scheme, so I don't want to sound too negative. I don't
think it's the best choice, but I don't think it's ruining you
either. :)

David

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 09:35:09AM -0400, Ben Shewmaker 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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