Re: lightweight languages

[Dorai Sitaram <address@hidden>]

[Dan Weinreb]
>    From: Dorai Sitaram <ds26@gte.com>
> 
>    Scheme (and not just Scheme, of course) lets you do CPS
>    perspicuously.  That does not mean you have to do it,
> 
> You're presenting this from the point of view of a writer of code,
> whereas I am taking the point of view of a reader of code.  If Scheme
> programmers typically make heavy use of CPS and call/cc stuff, perhaps
> because that's how they were taught to program, then as a reader I
> don't have the choice you're talking about.

Interesting.  I wonder if this is a common experience,
ie, finding other people's Scheme code to contain lots
of inscrutable CPSing and call/cc-ing?  It has not been
mine, but I'm just one datapoint.  (It is also not
clear to me if you are presenting the experience as an
interesting hypothesis, or as something you
actually underwent.)

I should think that peer pressure in Scheme tends to be
against using complicated tools just because one
can.  There is more than a hint of a Thoreauvian
ethic behind Scheme (the opening lines of the Scheme
standard are almost: "Our life is frittered away by
detail...  Simplify, simplify."), and this has often
been critiqued.  So it is striking, to me at least, to
see something like the opposite critique being leveled
here.  

(It is not my contention that Scheme is easy learning,
by the way.  Just trying to save you the trouble of 
persuading me that it is difficult.)

--d