One reason manpower is short... [LWN.net]

One reason manpower is short...

Posted Aug 12, 2003 5:56 UTC (Tue) by rganesan (subscriber, #1182)
In reply to: One reason manpower is short... by roskegg
Parent article: State of the GnuCash project

I respectfully disagree. Note that I am not disparaging scheme in any way.
I am also not denying that Scheme may be a good choice for Gnucash. I use GnuCash every day despite having some issues with it's UI and performance, so the choice can't be all that bad ;-). However, I agree that Scheme *is* the main reason for lack for developers. It's simply not a mainstream language.

I like Lisp and it's variants, I've even tried my hand at some Emacs Lisp
programming. However I never got around to doing serious programming
in Lisp or Scheme. On the other hand I have written decent sized programs
in C/C++/Java/Perl/Python. I have contributed to a few open source projects. I even have a patch for gnucash for supporting Indian mutual funds - but that's a patch for C code in gnucash. You may not like my attitude, but hey, that's the reality. I am sure a lot of developers share this view.

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One reason manpower is short...

Posted Aug 12, 2003 12:02 UTC (Tue) by Per_Bothner (subscriber, #7375) [Link]

It is weird how someone who has written "decent sized programs
in C/C++/Java/Perl/Python" should have problems with Scheme.
I don't understand this - Scheme is a very simple language
- much simpler than Perl, certainly.

It is also strange how Perl/Python are viewed as "mainstream" but
Scheme is not, even though Scheme is much more mainstream
when it comes to the history and development of
programming languages.

Now there are styles of Scheme programming with heavy use
of nested lambdas that may be harder to understand for most people
(including myself), but I assume GnuCash doesn't do that.

One reason manpower is short...

Posted Aug 13, 2003 5:29 UTC (Wed) by rganesan (subscriber, #1182) [Link]

> It is weird how someone who has written "decent sized programs
> in C/C++/Java/Perl/Python" should have problems with Scheme.
> I don't understand this - Scheme is a very simple language
> - much simpler than Perl, certainly.

I didn't say I had problems with Scheme. I had taken a Lisp
Programming course for my under graduate degree and have done some
simple Emacs Lisp programming. I never did any serious programming
with Lisp/Scheme in my professional career though.

> It is also strange how Perl/Python are viewed as "mainstream" but
> Scheme is not, even though Scheme is much more mainstream
> when it comes to the history and development of
> programming languages.

I am fairly confident that's a view shared by a large number of developers. I am a professional software developer and in the three companies that I've worked in over the last 10 years, Perl is certainly more "mainstream" than Scheme. In other words, I haven't come across any scheme programmers among my colleagues. I can't say the same for Python though. Hardly anybody seems to be aware of Python at the companies I've worked, but it definitely has more traction than scheme.

LISP style not readable

Posted Aug 26, 2003 15:46 UTC (Tue) by Dareth (guest, #14475) [Link]

Syntax is syntax for most languages...

Pascal,C,Java, hell even Perl.

Lisp just doesn't fit the normal mold.
Most programmers can sit down and read code examples and pick up
the syntax of the language. Some quick testing, writing examples,
modifying code and you got the basic idea.

Look at the basic Welcome or Hello World .scm file.

I can follow what it is doing, but I wouldn't want to just make
arbitrary changes to see what if. To many "gotchas" especially with the nesting of the braces.

The comments are helpful.. but some heavy tutorials will be needed to get coders past the initial "WTF kind of code is this!" reaction.