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Message from discussion Losing the platonic ideal
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David Rush  
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 More options Aug 22 2007, 7:00 am
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: David Rush <kumoy...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 11:00:27 -0000
Local: Wed, Aug 22 2007 7:00 am
Subject: Re: Losing the platonic ideal
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This post is especially cynical and pessimistic.

On Aug 22, 9:02 am, dr.tfgor...@googlemail.com wrote:

> On 22 Aug., 08:34, b...@cs.berkeley.edu (Brian Harvey) wrote:

> > Not especially.  We tell our students that the tools they're going to use in
> > their professional careers haven't been invented yet, but that the big ideas
> > we're teaching them will remain valid and useful even if they're forced to
> > program in Javascript or something.

> The sad thing for me is that good tools have been invented, long ago,
> that just haven't succeeded in the marketplace yet.

There's many reasons for that:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.scheme/msg/886d41141e98d4ec
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.scheme/msg/cd06922d6c71ac6d

outline a few of my own personal moments of rage against the machine.

> There is reason to think there is new window
> of opportunity which R6RS can take advantage of to help disseminate
> these tools.

No. There really isn't. The requirements of corporate software
development are antithetical to high-quality engineering. The
situation is not entirely different from the construction of the
railroads in the US during the 19th century. The engineering was done
in such a hurry that the bridges regularly fell down. In fact, it was
so bad that Jules Verne used the untrustworthiness of the American
railroads as one of Phileas Fogg's obstacles to overcome in _Around
the World in 80 Days_.

My point being that 'cost-effective' engineering is not the same as
'high-quality' engineering. I prefer to do high-quality work. Scheme
is a fairly high-quality language (the quality tradeoffs w/rt
engineering cost fall in lovely places for me). But the dominant cost
is labor for which there are far more cheap, half-trained puppies from
'Technical Institutes' available for hire. And those people want 'Do
What I Mean' syntax and turn to Perl and Ruby and are willing to debug
like ants by just trying random solutions and code snippets farmed
from the internet until they find something that does the job.

And the really depressing thing is that it will *never* change. I am
not teaching my children my trade. The fun has gone out of it
entirely. The software industry is turning into an industrial
revolution sweatshop full of children (immature minds) laboring 16
hour days. And the management literature - instead of examining how to
adequately budget for creative processes - is full of how to convince
developers that they actually enjoy the abuse they receive!

> > Your suggestion that a lot of Scheme programming jobs would make it easier to
> > teach Scheme misses the point, I think.  We're not "teaching Scheme."  I spend
> > about an hour teaching Scheme, and for the rest of the semester I /use/ Scheme
> > to teach /computer science/.

YES YES YES!!! Go Brian!

> But wouldn't a commercially successful
> Scheme make it easier for more educators to elect to teach using
> Scheme?"

Only for about the next year. Then there will be a new buzzword
clamoring for compliance. Trying to surf the market wave is a losing
strategy.

> I think you are being too pessimistic, honestly.  Wouldn't a R6RS
> library defining some suitable subset for teaching purposes, close
> to R5RS Scheme, meet your needs?

This is the *essence* of most of the 'no' votes. The R5.97RS is not
factored correctly to make that possible. It's that simple. That's why
I keep hoping that sense will break out somewhere. And it's not just
important for education, either.

david rush
--
http://cyber-rush.org/drr/scheme <- a very messy construction^Wweb site


 
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