RE: Scheme is too complicated

["Knotwell, Brad" <BradK@morpho.com>]

> I'm just getting to the "solving everyday programming tasks" 
> myself.  The
> learning curve on scheme has been steeper for me than on any previous
> language (although it just barely beats learning the OO 
> paradigm for C++).
> I'd previously been in the habit of reaching the skill level needed to
> solve most basic problems in well under a week, but Scheme 
> seems to want
> more of my time than that.

I'll second this.  Although it's trivial to write mathematical functions in
scheme (way easier than C IMO), it's less obvious how to perform more common
tasks--implement a socket server or process text files.  

I would guess these are trivial as well.  However, the how behind them is
not obvious.
  
> 
> Stepping back a bit though, I wonder if the difficulty isn't 
> more in the
> fact that Scheme assumes some much different programming thought
> processes than those used in C,C++,Perl,Java,etc.  I think 
> that if I had
> learned something from the Lisp family earlier it would be 
> much easier.
> If that's the case, then there should be a good market for 
> "Scheme for C
> programmers" books, as well as a good number of people who start on it
> early and don't see what the big deal is.

As one who is slowly learning scheme, it's encouraging to periodically run
into various features that make you want to learn more.  Personally, scheme
was the first language I've used that allowed you to _pleasantly_ pass
functions as arguments to procedures.  Similarly, the function w/i a
function (lexical scoping and closures) paradigm is a really slick way of
creating private members.

IMO, scheme/guile have a whole different terminology for describing
programming problems.  This makes it somewhat overwhelming to the
uninitiated.  Personally, I think this is due to scheme having more of an
academic bent than C or perl.

Personally, it would be helpful for me if some example code came with the
guile distributioin that covered some of the more common programming tasks.

> 
> 
> Erik

--Brad