CompSci is SO bizarre! When I was knocking around CS (stork with twins ended my grad school hopes ;-) ), there were so many conflicting facts and opinions about computers. This was at Wichita State. We had a Lisp genius who did automated math theorem proofs. I asked him in an email if I should maybe tackle Lisp. His email reply said "No, learn C". Three words. Short, concise, to the point. And there was the UW(ash) professor who was a firm believer that any language that let you do the stuff C/Assembler/C++ etc. did should be left in the past. The argument goes that speed is good enough these days, CPU cycles are practically free, so it's time to move forward and stop the blood-and-guts pointer pennance and go-it-alone memory management games. Then I find out that practically nothing MS has ever sold actually used Visual C++ (something they pushed relentlessly as THE Big Project environment). MS uses blood-and-guts C with the usual mountain of MS secret tricks. Then they push all these IDEs that do basically one thing: data management on Windows. Lord help you if you get off their straight line expressway through the jungle. Then there's Big Eric Raymond with his "The Art of Unix Programming." He says C's great and scripting languages too. He's very happy with the byzantine, wooden-handled level of Unix--then, now, and in the future. Then there's Knuth who had his own home-brewed assembler (the latest runs on a virtual MIPS environment). For him even C is too low-brow. And then there's Lisp-Meister Paul Graham. I read about a functional language conference he attended where some Perl people showed up. A panel discussion left Perl a bloody pulp. Graham is famous for Yahoo Stores, which has lots of Lisp in it. Orbitz also has Lisp. In general, if programmers get good at something, they have the subjective, self-serving if not paranoid tendency to see the computer world revolving around their skill set, their language(s). [your-language-here] can do everything! Oddly enough, I (as well as Bill Joy, Ray Kurzweil and others) grok what the Unabomber Ted K. was saying about computers and technology. In a nutshell, if a system is running, and you depend on it for something critical, and you don't know how to do without it (can't turn it off and walk away), and you no longer know how it works), you are it's slave. Forget The Matrix or AI dystopias. It's a real Alice in Wonderland out there. So many angles, so little time. Makes me want to just hack Emacs for the rest of my life. Olwe Leif Johnson wrote: >I never heard of Scheme! It's the first language that I've heard of >that was designed to make recursion practical. Now I'm curious to see >if any other language has taken this approach. > >On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:34:21 -0500, rpgoldman at real-time.com ><rpgoldman at real-time.com> wrote: > > >>>>>>>"Leif" == Leif Johnson <leif.t.johnson at gmail.com> writes: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> >> >> >> >> I remember being forbidden to use any looping constructs in my >> >> first semester of computer science. It was a very helpful >> >> discipline. >> >> >> >> Leif> Then tell them that they are never ever actually allowed to use >> Leif> recursion unless they can prove that the problem can be solved no >> Leif> other way. (just contributing to the flame-war.) >> >>I suppose if you have a compiler that's so dumb it can't rewrite >>tail-recursion to iteration, that might be true. (JCTtF-w.) >> >>Seriously, the Scheme standard demands that this optimization be >>performed, so why would you ever avoid tail recursion in Scheme? I >>dunno about other languages. I think you pretty much want to avoid it >>in C! >> >> >> _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list