[plt-scheme] Re: An Editors Tale

Dear Pinto,

what you are saying is absolutly true. I have come to appreciate the kind of algorythms you can write in Scheme. It's fun, clean, functional etc.

But there is far more to writing an application than algorythms. The difficulty with this newsgroup here is that most of its subscribers are skilled, highly skilled. I'm not, and everybody who read posts of mine to this list has at least by now figured out that I come from woodwork, while at the same time being kind enough not to suggest I should go back to it.

But I think there are a lot of people like me, not so skilled. I want to be a programer, but I don't have what it takes to be a software architect. DrScheme is the best Scheme IDE I've seen out there but it does requiere a far higher level of skill to use it productively than for instance the VS stuff.

The problem is the perspective, see? A "natural" programmer *can* take DrScheme and do all kinds of things with it, but someone with my level of skills gets stuck. *We* resort to VS then.

Best regards

Guenther

Pedro Pinto wrote:
>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
> 
> 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
>>
>>  
>>
> 
> 
>