What's your favorite year end method?

[Derek Atkins]

"Donald Allen" <donaldcallen at gmail.com> writes:

> No insult intended, but Paul Graham once observed that Perl programs
> look like a cartoon character swearing. One of the problems with the
> current Scheme implementation is that it's, well, Scheme, and
> therefore hard to read for people who aren't fluent in Lisp, the
> majority. I think Perl, powerful though it may be, is very hard to
> read. Tcl, too, and I've written a hell of a lot of Tcl code. This is
> the reason for my enthusiasm for Python -- it's easy to write concise,
> readable programs. Graham also observed that we spend a lot more time
> reading code than writing it. So I fear that writing reports in Perl
> smacks a bit of going from the frying pan into the fire.

Keep in mind that the reason for moving away from scheme isn't how the
language looks, but the (thin) field of developers who can actually
use the language.  I suspect there are a LOT of PERL devs out there..
Certainly many more than there are Scheme devs.  Not that I'm arguing
for PERL as the new reporting language, but let's keep focused on the
goal, which requires us to explicitly state the goals.

> I have no intention of starting a language flame war here, and I've
> been doing this for long enough (43 years professionally) to know this
> is a religious issue. I'd just hate to see this project repeat a past
> mistake. My $.02.

And which "past mistake" would that be?  I'm not trying to start
a religious war, either, I'm just trying to understand where you're
coming from and what you mean.

Thanks,

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available