Re: A plea for a new old language

[Michael Vanier <address@hidden>]

For CPS, at least, "The Little Schemer" fits the bill.  There is a chapter
on CPS, and it doesn't get much gentler than that.  ISTR that "Scheme and
the Art of Programming" by Springer and Friedman had some nice examples of
first-class continuations.  Also, Paul Graham's "On Lisp" (available at
http://store.yahoo.com/paulgraham/onlisptext.html) has some nice examples
in chapter 20.

Mike

> Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 13:12:57 -0500
> From: Trevis Rothwell <tjr@acm.org>
> 
> 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
>