Re: A bit further toward the flamewar

[Panicz Maciej Godek]

Could add some tiny fire drops to this flame, I'd say that
the readability and error-proneness of scheme programs
really depends on what you're doing (and on how you're
doing it)

I don't have any experience with any industrial application
of scheme and I am using it only for the purpose of fun
and cheerful hacking, and what I find really great about
it is that it really allows the top-bottom approach, so that
you can write a sentence that really resembles a sentence
of a natural language (and is therefore amazingly readable)
and then explain all the notions involved, until you reach
the level of some data representation (which could be really
chosen differently).

And this is a true joy to read.

I don't know much about  ML nor Ocaml, but I thought
the flame was supposed to be about scheme vs. C ;-)

And I think that, to some extent, C imposes on the programmer
a certain style of thinking -- that you really have to focus on the data
representation before you consider the logics of the program.
On the other hand, scheme also allows this scheme, and some
solutions for type checking indeed do pop out (like the aforementioned
racket, or bigloo, or -- not to look too far -- GOOPS and COOPS)

I think it was Peter Norvig who stated that C is a specialized language
for memory management and computer hardware stuff, and lisp is actually
a general-purpose programming language. The development of UNIX proves,
that there are some domains where C is irreplaceable, basically because
it gives you a fair abstraction over the existing computer hardware.

Lisp, on the other hand (and scheme particularly) is a fair abstraction
over the concept of programming. And still, there are cetrain things that
are best done in perl and which I would find annoying if I was supposed
to do them in scheme.

Yet Another Troll