David Rush wrote:
Is there a split between the serious computations folks like you on one side? I don't know who I'd put on the other side, the egg-headed theoreticians maybe :)
There is a split, and it's been around for a while. It's fundamentally much more psychological than technical, IMO. I'm not sure this is the right place to discuss it, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there was also a strong age correlation with the faction boundaries :)
Well ... I guess I know how old I am and which faction I'm in. :) But seriously, folks, I've had the virtues of simplicity drummed into my head since I first set my hands on an ancient 5-hole teletype paper tape punch and wrote a hexadecimal multiplication table generation program for ILLIAC I. And these days, it's so darned easy to invent a whole new language, or build an "internal" domain-specific language in Lisp, Scheme, Forth, Ruby or half a dozen others, that it doesn't seem worth fighting for. So call me a serious, pragmatic egg-headed theoretical software engineer. :)
How did the R6RS come to embrace feature-creep?
Because work always fills up to include all available brain-cycles :)
Don't tell my boss I have spare brain cycles, OK? :)