Re: Scheme is too complicated

[Erik <erik@msc.tamu.edu>]

On Mon, 26 Oct 1998, Jay Glascoe wrote:

> actually, I had a rather hard time learning Scheme; I mean, becoming
> comfortable enough with it for solving everday programming tasks.  At the
> time I first began learning it, I was an okay FORTRAN programmer and a
> barely competent shell/Perl programmer.  The idea of variable closures
> blew me away, and functional programming techniques were real slippery for
> me.  In fact, I'd never even been introduced to the notion of lexical
> scoping before.

I'm just getting to the "solving everyday programming tasks" myself.  The
learning curve on scheme has been steeper for me than on any previous
language (although it just barely beats learning the OO paradigm for C++).
I'd previously been in the habit of reaching the skill level needed to
solve most basic problems in well under a week, but Scheme seems to want
more of my time than that.

Stepping back a bit though, I wonder if the difficulty isn't more in the
fact that Scheme assumes some much different programming thought
processes than those used in C,C++,Perl,Java,etc.  I think that if I had
learned something from the Lisp family earlier it would be much easier.
If that's the case, then there should be a good market for "Scheme for C
programmers" books, as well as a good number of people who start on it
early and don't see what the big deal is.


Erik

BTW-  is it possible to compile guile to use kernel threads?  I saw code
for several different thread packages (mostly labeled as obsolete), but I
don't see the familiar LinuxThreads among them - and grepping for clone() 
doesn't find anything.