Don Box, in MSDN magazine no less, declares “Scheme is Love”.
All the cool languages have lambda these days. Lisp's lambda is nicer than many, but maybe he should have demonstrated macros instead. And focused on Common Lisp. But who am I to tell someone else what to love?
Posted by jjwiseman at September 23, 2005 05:20 PMHere is a quote from the article not to love,
"(define s (lambda (y) (+ y 1))) defines a new variable named s whose value is the function that calculates the successor of its argument."
So what am I to find so adorable about this article?
Posted by: david lamy on September 24, 2005 01:20 AMDavid, maybe you need some context. Read up about Don Box, what he has done, what is he working on, who read what he writes.
Or is it Scheme that bothers you? I'm not too sure what you're complaining about.
Cheers.
Posted by: anonymous schemer on September 24, 2005 01:31 AMThe quote contains the source of my discontent. Hint, it's neither Scheme nor lambda that bothers me. Is 's' really a variable?
Posted by: david lamy on September 24, 2005 08:04 AMIndeed, 's' is a variable. I still don't see the point of your comment.
Posted by: anonymous schemer on September 24, 2005 11:43 AMI think he means that s is a symbol, but I could be wrong. I don't particularly care. Box is a figure of tremendous respect in the C/C++ windows community, and for him to mention scheme is a pretty good deal. For him to mention it so positively is huge. If 1% of the people who follow his writings go look at a scheme, it will be a wonderful thing.
Posted by: matt knox on September 25, 2005 08:11 PMWell, the main problem I have with the article is that Dan Box does nto answer the question "if you like Lambda so much and work for Microsoft, then why is the CLR so unfriendly to Common Lisp?"
On his blog[1], Don Box links to a bunch of Scheme resources for her readers. "Finally, I found Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp to be an excellent companion to see how the other half lives. There are no shortage of bad Lisp books - this one was a real gem."
[1] http://pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/archive/2005/09/25/15013.aspx
Posted by: John Wiseman on September 27, 2005 08:54 PMTo answer marco, because M$ is a for-profit business trying to undermine Java. Some very smart lisp, smalltalk, haskell and sml people work on .net. They know what they are doing, and they don't need a lisp runtime.