The TIME CUBE - comp.lang.scheme

Message from discussion The TIME CUBE

Harald Korneliussen

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More options Feb 6 2004, 3:20 am

Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme

From: scallas...@mailexpire.com (Harald Korneliussen)

Date: 6 Feb 2004 00:20:32 -0800

Local: Fri, Feb 6 2004 3:20 am

Subject: Re: [OT] The TIME CUBE

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cartermar...@ukmail.com (Mark Carter) wrote in message
> Linus Pauling won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to chemistry. If
> I understand rightly, he then got interested in gyroscopes, but spun
> out of control (if you'll forgive the pun) by claiming that gyroscopes
> can have some kind of levitating effect. I think that he was then
> really ridiculed. There are many experts in gyroscopics who must have
> known a ton more than Pauling about the topic. The mechanics of
> gyroscopes would be well known to them. It seems unlikely that they
> could have missed such an obvious effect, if it existed.

Yeah, he also had some very strange ideas about vitamins, as I recall.

> Pythonistas seem to be much more willing to share their code, and
> engage in collaborative efforts than Schemers. This is also true for
> Perl. I wonder why that is. Python is bursting at the seams with
> modules, and there are frequent software offerings on
> comp.lang.python.announce. Yet these kinds of announcements are rare
> on Scheme and Lisp newsgroups.

I have looked at this too. Right now it seems there are more
announcements in comp.lang.ada than here. I think I have an
explanation for this:
Of the scheme software I've downloaded, most has required tweaking to
work on my scheme of choice (mzscheme). That's one thing. Another, far
more important thing to my eyes, is that programs are written in very,
very different styles. Scheme is suitable for functional, imperative,
declarative, message-parsing and/or object-oriented styles, plus a
couple of dozen that aren't invented yet. On top of that you get
personal idiosyncrasies like all programmers have, so if a scheme
program nevertheless is easy to read, it's probably because the author
happens to use the same styles as you.
(The lack of standard libraries is also a problem, although most
non-trivial programs I've downloaded use slib.)

So perhaps scheme's flexibility is it's greatest problem?

It may be that the lack of announcements have to do with interest: Ada
advocates are interested in anything that mentions Ada (because it's
so rare :-) but scheme enthusiasts are often computer science
academics, who may not be interested in every little application that
uses scheme as an extension language. Looking at freshmeat, I see
quite many scheme projects that have had releases already this year,
so this may be more probable.

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