To Scheme, or Not to Scheme

Some people might find playing with programming languages a fun exercise, but many of us just want to build shit that works. Scheme might be the best thing ever, but the two operating systems I develop on have native APIs written in Objective-C and C++, respectively. (If you're wondering, the two operating systems I'm talking about are Mac OS X and Haiku.)

IMO, Python is a great choice. Simple, clean language with a ton of APIs. I'm sure 90% of people out there will prefer hacking together quickie games using Python and PyGame to playing with continuations in Scheme.

PS: I don't wish to imply that Scheme is a bad programming language. In fact, I've been mucking about with Scheme for the past week or so.

I think the author needs to keep in mind the audience of HTDP:

"everyone should learn how to design programs."[1]

It is a book for a first semester not only for a CS curriculum, but for several other courses and styles.

"So why should anyone learn to program?

The answer consists of two parts. First, it is indeed true that traditional forms of programming are useful for just a few people. But, programming as we the authors understand it is useful for everyone: the administrative secretary who uses spreadsheets as well as the high-tech programmer. In other words, we have a broader notion of programming in mind than the traditional one. We explain our notion in a moment. Second, we teach our idea of programming with a technology that is based on the principle of minimal intrusion. Hence our notion of programming teaches problem-analysis and problem-solving skills without imposing the overhead of traditional programming notations and tools."[1]

If you are already a programmer, there is a commentary from Matthias Falleisen about how you should read the book:

"If you are an experienced programmer, you should read HtDP like this:

  -- read the sections whose title starts with "Designing ...."
  -- also read the "iterative refinement" sections
  -- pick five exercises in the preceding and/or follow-up sections  

and solve them according to the recipe -- unless you're stuck move forward -- try to understand the "symmetry" between data definitions and templates

I expect that somewhere around late part II, you will slow down. You may pick up real reading as of part III, though some may make it thru III and only "stutter" in IV.

Also:

  -- use check-expect to express your examples/tests
  -- avoid draw.ss exercises, replace them with world.ss but that's a  

non-trivial switch " [2]

[1] http://htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum-Z-H-2.html

[2]http://groups.google.com/group/plt-scheme/browse_thread/thre...

It depends on what you want to use it for. I've found that doing exploratory web development in Scheme is really painful.

You are basically on your own, and have to develop everything from scratch. For example, if you want to make a simple get request from the twitter API and examine the results, you've got to be prepared to do a lot of work in extracting it out (unless you are a scheme guru).

If you want to authenticate with OAuth, good luck with that, you'll have to write your own OAuth library from scratch.

To Scheme.