Re: Zen of Python

[Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <address@hidden>]

   Date: 28 May 2002 14:16:22 -0000
   To: Guy.Steele@east.sun.com
   From: Paul Graham <pg@archub.org>
   Subject: Re: Zen of Python
   Cc: ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
   
   
   > The fact that Scheme eschews succinctness in other areas suggests to me
   > that its inventors measured power in something other than succinctness.
   
   Since one of the inventors is on this list, let's just ask
   him.  What did you aim for in Scheme?  (And would you aim for
   the same things now?)  Thanks,  --pg
   
As you can read in Sussman and Steele, "The First Report on Scheme
Revisited", J. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation 11, 399-404 (1998),
our initial goal was to create a tiny interpreter for a toy language,
intentionally designed to have as little mechanism as possible,
just barely sufficient to implement the essential behavior of
Hewitt's theory of actors.  Only later, after our discovery that
actors and closures of lambda expressions were implemented by
identical mechanisms did we consider extending Scheme to become
a useful programming language.  See Steele and Sussman, "The Revised
Report on SCHEME: A Dialect of LISP", AI Memo 452, MIT AI Laboratory,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 1978.  Succeedings reports on
Scheme continued to take a fairly conservative, minimalist approach
to extending the language.

--Guy Steele