scripting language vs. developer community size

[Rob Browning]

Dan Kegel <dank@alumni.caltech.edu> writes:

> By the way, I went and bought a Scheme book today at my favorite
> technical bookstore (Op-Amp Books in Los Angeles).  I asked the
> clerk where the Scheme books were and he sniggered... there was an
> entire wall of C++ books, and just four books about Scheme (three,
> if you don't count duplicates).  Now I'm reading about car, cdr,
> caar, cddr, cadr, cdar, and the like.

Two things:

  (1) For scheme to be more successful, it will help a great deal if
      the SRFI's become widely available.  Scheme is a very nice,
      small, well-defined language, but it lacks a lot of the
      convenience functions you might want.  For example SRFI-1 is
      very helpful in this respect (for more info see the SRFI section
      at www.schemers.org).

  (2) If you haven't seen it, I give my highest recommendation to the
      the book people usually refer to as SICP.  It's the "Structure
      and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Abelson and Sussman.
      Aside from being an excellent way to learn scheme, it will
      probably broaden the way you think about computer programming.

FWIW

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930