Is there anything *enjoyable* about our development process?

[Josh Sled]

On Sun, 2005-10-16 at 10:40 +0100, Neil Williams wrote:
> On Saturday 15 October 2005 12:22 am, Josh Sled wrote:
> > If you have any interest in programming, you should know lisp.  Period.
> 
> !!!! Rubbish ! 
> 
> That's a myth propagated in university colleges that has no relation to the 
> real world of self-taught programmers.

> Lisp is included in various computer science courses for good reasons - 
> esoteric reasons - but no language is universal.

Lisp is universal in a way that none of those other languages are.  My
argument is only that if one has any interest in programming, then the
unique simplicity and perspective of lisp is something one should know.

I suppose it is esoteric relative to how all other mainstream languages
have developed.  That doesn't make it not worth knowing about.  It's an
important enough contribution to the field to make it worth the time to
go out of one's way to understand.  It's eye-opening.  It will influence
how you write code in those other languages, which is not something that
goes the other way; no one looks at the simplicity of expression in a
Java source file and feels the need to re-write their lisp code.


> We don't have the privilege, Josh, of only selecting GnuCash developers from 
> those with an "acceptable" language background.
> 
> If we keep that premise, gnucash ends up in /dev/null (and soon).

This is not my argument.

My comment was about programming, not about GnuCash.

I don't want to require gnucash contributors to be required to know
lisp, or pass some Programming Estoerica exam.  <USian-half-joke>I have
no litmus-test for GnuCash contributors.</>

...jsled
-- 
http://asynchronous.org/ - `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}`