On Sunday, 10 July 2016 at 02:44:14 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Saturday, 9 July 2016 at 08:39:10 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Seems that in order to make it useful, users had to extend it.
This doesn't fit the criteria.
Scheme is a simple functional language which is easy to extend.
Why would you conflate "useful" with "used for writing complex
programs"?
Anyway, there are many other examples, but less known.
Wirth's Pascal had the same problem. He invented an elegant,
simple, consistent, and useless language. The usable Pascal
systems all had a boatload of dirty, incompatible extensions.
I am not sure if Pascal is elegant, but it most certainly is
useful. So I don't think I agree with your definition of
"useful".
What programmers think of as "intuitive" is often a collection
of special cases.
I think I would need examples to understand what you mean here.
I agree with Walter here. Scheme is not a language that you can
generally do useful things in. If you want to do anything
non-trivial, you switch to Racket (which is not as minimalistic
and "pure" as Scheme).
