On Feb 9, 2008 10:16 PM, Tracy R Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I don't know what that means. I'm implementing Scheme tidbits as > > SICP reveals them to me. This is a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity not > > soon to be repeated... ...to actually > > implement language X while you are learning language X.
Lot's of folks did that while learning FORTH. > Implementing a lisp is easy and fun. Now perhaps we all understand why > there are so many lisps, why that may have hurt the adoption, why there > are no huge sets of libraries that work with any particular lisp, why > there is no documentation, etc. A lot of the people who created their > own lisp actually fleshed it out and promoted its use but not enough > people so far have gotten behind any one lisp and one standard. Not that > it matters for a lot of jobs but it discourages people coming from a > perl/python background. And here lies the conundrum: Perl/python were a > real pain to implement and took massive amounts of time and are harder > to understand conceptually resulting in one main implementation that > everyone uses and they have huge mindshare. So which way should we > really be going? Hard to implement practically guaranteeing a single > implementation yet conceptually muddles or simple to implement and send > a hit squad after anyone who proposes that their own toy implementation > be used by anyone else? > > -- > Tracy R Reed /s/lisp/forth/ Tracy provides a very good description of exactly what happened. The basics of computing are really so simple that almost any intelligent soul can implement them. And it is fun. Chuck Moore always emphasized fun. He did say pay the rent first. But most of you have mortgages. How many poets have mortgages? I am of the "low rent is a basic requirement for a creative community" school. That is _not_ San Diego. The hard part is agreeing on how to implement things. The more intelligent the people involved the less agreement, especially when the intelligent people are creative. But what happens is the folks with big mortgages knuckle down and do the hard part. Not much fun. Not very creative either. So "Hard to implement" wins. One form of "worse is better." I am resigned to it. Sigh, BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
