Report development without the need to restart GnuCash

[Donald Allen]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Adam Funk <a24061 at ducksburg.com> wrote:
> On 2008-05-22, Donald Allen wrote:
>
>> Perhaps. But I refer you to the book "Structure and Interpretation of
>> Computer Programs", by Abelson, Sussman and Sussman (MIT Press). If
>> you make the investment of your time to read this classic book, you
>> will be amply rewarded. And you will come to understand, I'm quite
>> sure, why Scheme makes so much semantic and syntactic sense. And when
>> you've written programs in an environment that supports it properly,
>> such as MIT Scheme, you are very likely to find that you are more
>> productive in Scheme than any other language.
>
> This is somewhere on my to-do list.
>
>> Scheme, and it's parent language, Lisp, has always been a hard sell,
>> because people look at Scheme programs and they don't look like what
>> they expect computer programs to look like. And they tend to dismiss
>> it at that point, without considering that the language was designed
>> by some extremely smart people, and there are good reasons why it is
>> the way it is.
>
> In theory, I think Lisp is great.  In practice, I find it pretty hard
> to read (like backwards German) but that is strongly conditioned by
> using other languages.

I love the Einstein quote "In theory, there's no difference between
theory and practice." Smart guy, old Albert.

But I digress. Yes, Lisp/Scheme can be hard to read *at first*, and I
think your explanation is right. But humans learn to read all sorts of
things that we Americans find odd-looking, like Hebrew or Chinese. But
reading Scheme can be learned, and I think the entry fee is rewarded
by a tremendous return-on-investment. Once you're in, then you begin
to understand the benefits of the simple, consistent syntax as well as
the fact that the syntax makes it possible to make editors, e.g.,
emacs, that are much better matched to the language in terms of
formatting and especially editing (cutting/copying and pasting code is
so much easer with emacs/scheme than any other editor/language pair
I've ever used). And semantically, Jerry Sussman and Guy Steele and
the others who have contributed to Scheme have found the minimal basis
set; once you understand the simple foundation principles of the
language, you don't have to go back to the documentation to try to dig
out the special case du jour. And, of course, there's the power of
functions as first-class objects and program-writing programs, neither
of which is nearly as well-supported in other languages, even those
with roots in Scheme, like R or Python.

/Don

>
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>