Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote at 05/14/2011 03:27 PM:
I'd put this a bit differently:
Racket will teach you all the things that Scheme would have (i.e., it would have the same
contribution to your growth as a programmer), but also much more because of the many
things it has that Scheme doesn't have. You could stop at the "end of Scheme",
or you can keep going.
I agree that's probably a better message.
In addition, I think it would behoove us to better manage the
"standards" perception. The following is I think that...
In the period that I've been paying attention, standards seemed to get
really important in software industry in the late '80s and early '90s,
with changes like as the "open systems" movement. And then there was
another milestone, when there was initially a
ha-ha-not-falling-for-that-one-again reaction when historically abusive
MS introduced .NET and C# (which they had to address by creating an
"independent, open source alternative"). Plus, there are examples of
successful standards for other languages, so having a standard is itself
considered a best practice.
When industry people come from other languages to look at Racket,
they've already placed Racket in their conceptual framework, where
"standard" is heavily loaded. So, when these people read in Wikipedia
and memetic descendants of Wikipedia that R6RS is the "standard", even
though I think R6RS should be shot in the gut and left in a ditch to die
painfully, people naturally assume that R6RS is the obvious way to go.
"Use non-standard?! Get back from me, you satan!"
So they spend the weekend trying to do something in R6RS, stumbling over
little headaches doing that in Racket, ask questions, and are suspicious
when Racket people try to tell them to just do things in a non-R6RS way
that sounds like sneaky "proprietary non-standard extensions lock-in
bad-engineering" salesmanship. In a day or two, they've lost interest
or written off "Scheme", and they move on to the next interesting thing
to look at.
--
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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