Re: Beginner to programming. References to understand terms.

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 5:41 PM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2017-04-27 20:27 GMT+02:00 Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com>:
>
>> That's why I said Scheme is a great second language --
>> introduce it after the students have gotten past the "this is how to
>> make the computer do what you want it to do" stage, bring in some new
>> fundamentals, really broaden horizons.
>
> I have no experience of Scheme, but I have written some Guile,
> which I'm told is litlle more than a rebranding of Scheme. The sheer
> size of the vocabulary is daunting. Doesn't suit my taste at all. Its
> Zen seems to "more is less".
>

Guile isn't a programming language, per se. It's an entire extension
system designed with C++ interop in mind. The programming language at
the core of this system is a dialect of Scheme, but it's had tons of
stuff bolted onto it -- keep in mind that these are the same people
who made EMACS what it is today.

Scheme itself is actually a pretty minimalistic language. There are a
few places where it gets dense, particularly around coroutines, but
for the most part it's a small number of primitives and everything
else is library functions.

/s/ Adam