[plt-scheme] Re: An Editors Tale

Guenther,

For a living, I write mission critical, distributed systems with .NET 
pretty much since the Beta versions. I appreciate the platform, 
especially when compared with the crap that it aims to replace 
(COM/MFC/Win32) but really, Scheme is by far more interesting, more 
productive and just plain more fun (plus the Scheme crowd is 
considerably more knowledgeable than the average .NET developer). And 
you can produce real software. The mail system through which this 
message was sent was written in Scheme (it took only a weekend of 
glorious hacking by a an unexperienced Schemer). DrScheme itself is 
written in Scheme. Yes, there are things you will miss, that can be 
taken for granted in .NET (auto-completion, wizards, debuggers) but to 
some degree these features are there to cater to inexperienced 
programmers or to compensate for weaknesses in C# and friends, and thus 
their absence is not as significant as you might think.

Besides you don't have to choose. You can use dot-scheme 
(http://www.rivendell.ws/dot-scheme) today to interop with .NET. The 
next version of dot-scheme (out real soon now) will greatly improve the 
integration level.

Finally, let me try to change your perception of Visual Studio. I use it 
every day and I detest the thing. It might look cute and sexy when you 
have only small projects to work with, but it is an absolute nightmare 
with more complex work. In terms of usability it is complete and utter 
crap, the build system is slow, feeble and stupid and the whole freaking 
mess will spontaneously combust (i.e. crash) at least once every other 
day. I could say a lot more, but I better not.

By all means explore the .NET platform, but believe me, you will not see 
any increase in productivity, learning or fun by switching to C#/Visual 
Studio.

-pp





>Message: 4
>To: plt-scheme at list.cs.brown.edu
>From: Guenther Schmidt <gue.schmidt at web.de>
>Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 18:34:26 +0000
>Subject: [plt-scheme] Re: An Editors Tale
>
>Hi Paulo, hi Shiram,
>
>no I didn't take offense, just to let you know.
>
>Shiram, if you've followed my previous posts there is one where I'm complaining a bit about it beeing very hard to use DrScheme for GUI development. I've had a nice reply from Matthias about it.
>
>See the thing is I feel quite similar to the guy who started this thread. I've come to appreciate CL and Scheme *very* much but with DrScheme and PLT I must say that although I learned a lot, I can not see my self *producing* any software any time soon. And I do consider that important too.
>
>In one of my last posts I said that I was going to leave Scheme and CL alone for now in favour of the .NET stuff.
>
>Paulo I'm personaly a penguin too, but after reading the FAQs on http://go-mono.net I got more comfortable touching .NET and using VS for it.
>The thing is I am sick and tired of *having* to go everywhere by foot when programming, and VS takes a lot of this hazzle away. I've done the 'by foot' thing long enough!
>
>Computers are machines they "should" make things *easer*, that's the original idea behind it and not steal your time from you.
>It sometimes seems that if it's got all those things that make things easier, *some* people seem to think well this doesn't have blood, sweat and tears to it so it's not proper programming and we won't have it.
>Sorry I do not share that view.
>
>Best regards
>
>Guenther
>
>  
>