> Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:55:07 -0500 > From: Jon Wilson <j85wil...@fastmail.fm> > Subject: Re: [r6rs-discuss] (no subject) > > Hi Guillermo, > Arthur has convinced me that I am being far too inflammatory here. > Please ratchet my tone down several notches. I apologize for any > offense I have given, and hope that it does not reflect poorly upon > our > future interactions.
Done. No problem. > I do confess to still being puzzled though by the strength of your > insistence upon case insensitivity, given your statements about > your use > of Scheme, and the relatively minor (in my eye) change that it really > is. I'm frankly happy either way. What's minor is in the eye of the beholder. And just because I'm not currently using it much at the moment doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to use it again, and hope to some day. Perhaps it is nothing more than a fantasy, but I hope not. Mitch Wand asked whether case sensitivity was just a metaphor for something else. I know little about literature and literary analysis, but perhaps he's unto something. I'll wax philosophical for the next few paragraphs. You can consider this the ramblings of an old fogey. Someone else (I forget who -- sorry), said (and I'm paraphrasing) that there is a culture clash between - Scheme is a Lisp - Scheme is independent of Lisp I am a Lisper. Scheme was not my first Lisp, but it is my favorite one. But the tradition is important. It makes the language feel like 'home'. Part of that tradition is case insensitivity [and even '() vs #f]. I think that it demeans the language not to acknowledge and share with its ancestry. I'm proud of that ancestry (for a while some Schemers were not and wanted to pull the language in the direction of ML and related languages -- they actively would choose things to be different from Lisp to break that tradition -- to me that was insanity). Now, adding new procedures to the library, or new macros, doesn't threaten that relationship. I can choose to use them or not. But inessential incompatibilities do. Moving away from the spirit of hacking (e.g. removing REPLs) also does. The language loses something. I have no objection to someone creating a new language which is similar to Scheme, and calling it something else. They can even go fully out of the way and make it completely incompatible with earlier versions. They are calling it something else, and as such, I have no expectation of compatibility or the preservation of tradition. But please don't call it Scheme if you remove the joy out of it. And for me, part of that joy is the tradition, the Lispyness, and the hackery. As Hal Abelson once said: 'MIT made a mistake by not trade-marking the name'. I also value case insensitivity because as a freshman at MIT, I would talk to Gerry Sussman on the phone and we'd talk about code. That's hard in a case- sensitive language, when people start using things like caml-code, which I abhor. I value names like 'cdadr' because we could talk really fast about code. Now, I may be the only one. I doubt it. Brian Harvey and Joe Marshall have both expressed annoyance at case sensitivity, and they are both old timers from the hacker school, as I consider myself to be. But at a larger scale, the fracturing of the community and the rejection of R6RS must be due in part to this. English is missing a wonderful Spanish word -- 'Adanismo'. It means 'rejecting all prior history as if one were the first man, namely Adam'. I (and I suspect other old timers) feel that the younger generation that is pushing Scheme forward has fallen prey to that. That they change things almost willy-nilly and do not look at what was done in the past, or consider alternatives that are consistent with the past. But it's late, and I need to take my 4-year-old to her bed so I can sleep in mine, and this is probably a longer and more rambling answer than you expected. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list r6rs-discuss@lists.r6rs.org http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
