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too complicated is not the issue



Since I received a couple of replies, a clarification:

Do you want a gnu scheme or a canonical scripting language? In
my opinion these goals are not likely to be congruent.

The difficulty is not functional programming, it is lack of visual
cues for variable binding scope and control flow. How scheme
compares to other existing languages is not the issue.
The differences between functional, imperative, and object-oriented
programming where they exist are not the primary obstacle to deployment
of scheme.

Let's use a different analogy and see if the point becomes clear:

It's ten years ago, and you're flying around in this Huey (huge
helicopter), getting big jobs done (using common lisp). You decide
that having something that worked more or less the same way
but was much smaller and more nimble would certainly be handy
for some of the work that you need to do.

So you design this small, fast, nimble helicopter, and you call it
scheme. How likely is it that this new helicopter is going to become
a useful daily commuter vehicle?

"Well, we weren't design a 4-seater subcompact." Exactly.

Regards, Clayton Weaver  <mailto:cgweav@eskimo.com>  (Seattle)