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Re: A plea for a new old language




For years I thought that Scheme/Lisp was neat.  I wanted to learn it.
But not until I was in a class where I was required to learn it did
I actually do so.  And what really helped me a lot was having to go
through a set of (in retrospect) basic exercises writing recursive
functions in Scheme.  Once I did that, something clicked in my
thinking, and Scheme is probably my favorite language now.

Perhaps what would help here is a "standard" set of *relatively*
easy continuation problems that learners should go through, to help
establish in their minds what continuations are all about?

 -- Trevis


Matt Hellige wrote:
> 
> I agree. Developers will learn to deal with "difficult" concepts when
> they're faced with them. This is how we grow as programmers...
> 
> This actually brings up an interesting issue with open source
> development, though: if maintainers of OSS are afraid to use XYZ
> "advanced technique" in their code, because they fear losing the
> help of less experienced contributors, what does this say about the
> quality of OSS relative to its potential? How many code-bases out
> there have been dumbed-down this way out of fear? Perhaps more
> importantly, what does this say about the personal development of open
> source programmers? How do we expect less experienced programmers to
> improve their skills if they just leave when the going gets tough?
> 
> Maybe this is an argument in favor of a more traditional employment
> relationship where programmers can't simply walk away from a project
> when faced with something they don't yet undrestand... Look, for
> example, at the success of Erlang. Would that ever have happened in an
> open source environment?
> 
> Matt
> 
> --
> Matt Hellige                  matt@immute.net
> http://matt.immute.net