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Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2012 12:34:11 -0900
Message-ID: <CAC4O8c_+ujbsqMF0vKN31ohhOmxpo5UL+UQ1K9SYm+WyQO7PmQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Scheme, was Re: [geda-user] Thoughts on gschem UI
From: Britton Kerin <britton DOT kerin AT gmail DOT com>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
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On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:24 AM, John Doty <jpd AT noqsi DOT com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 18, 2012, at 9:35 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:
>
>> Scheme has got to be the
>> simplest, cleanest programming language I've ever seen.  If a supposedly
>> "technical" person cannot wrap his/her brain around Scheme, then perhaps
>> a different line of work is in order.
>
> One of the problems, I think, is that Guile is a maximal Scheme implementation, with a huge built-in vocabulary. Most users will never use 3/4 of it, although which 3/4 will depend on the user. The official Guile documents don't really distinguish between "everyday use" and "fancy stuff".

This is the problem with both functional langs I've worked with (emacs
lisp and javascript).  The grammar is simple but that's irrelevant because
there are a bunch of metaprogramming functions around or in the libs that
do strange and often badly documented things that you have to know about.

I don't know why functional languages have this problem, but the library
docs tend to be weak, compared to static types languages.  I've never seen
anything like javascript for the amount of trial-and-error you have to do
to do anything.

I'm not sure how to avoid this effect, but maybe its worth noting that
it exists.

Britton