Re: OT: Re: [Chicken-users] rails-like framework

[F. Wittenberger]

Am Dienstag, den 25.04.2006, 11:43 -0700 schrieb Shawn Rutledge:
> On 4/25/06, Pupeno <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Monday, 24 de April de 2006 22:12, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> > > A side project is how to get rid of the parentheses so that ordinary
> > > people can tolerate writing Scheme.
> > Getting rid of parenthesis is dangerous, people may forget that while 
> > writting
> > Scheme programs you are doing it as Scheme data and that programs are no 
> > more
> > than a tree (build up with cons... lists if you like).
> 
> OK, so the concept that data and code are the same is important, but
> the parentheses are just there because pre-order syntax with variable
> numbers of arguments requires some kind of delimiter.  (And HP
> calculator users take the opposite stance that RPN is so wonderful
> precisely because you don't need delimiters.)  I think teaching the
> concept requires some thought about the structure in memory; it's way
> more important than the ASCII syntax.

May I second that!

I feel that most of these religious wars about programming languages
stem from some warm feeling when you come closer to the ASCII style you
are used to.  That's like coming at home, sure, but no more.

Be multilingual and you can choose the tool language according to the
problem domain.

>   The books use diagrams to show
> this, yet there is no editor to let you interactively modify memory by
> manipulating diagrams.  (And then there is the related issue that
> keyboarding is faster than mousing.  So you just have to make the
> diagram manipulation similarly efficient by keyboard.  MathCAD
> achieved this, for math expressions.  I used to use it on DOS, without
> a mouse.)

Wait.  I'm longing for such a tool.  What makes it special to math
expressions?  (Or: what's the difference between lambda calculus and
math, so why should this not work for Scheme?)

> 
> 
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