[plt-scheme] Comment re: Help Desk

Would it also help if the text next to r5rs was a little more
discouraging in the initial dialog, do you think?

Robby

On 9/13/07, Matt Jadud <jadudm at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have more than one today, and I'm taking care of a bunch of email.
>
> A colleague across the land-sea of the USA was working on writing some
> code in DrScheme. They gravitated towards R5RS (believing this was the
> way to go), and threw their hands up at the absence of reasonable
> things, like a random number generator, or the ability to grab the
> current date in seconds, etc.
>
> Now, they haven't worked with PLT Scheme a lot, but spent plenty of
> time in the past with Chez. Thinking that R5RS is the right language
> to choose was, I'm going to argue, reasonable.
>
> Their comment, after learning that language choice restricts help-desk
> results, was that it might have been nice if there was a way for them
> to know that there were other results under other languages. That is,
> if they had known there were '78 results in MzScheme (Textual)' as
> opposed to nothing found in R5RS (when they searched for 'random'),
> they might have spent less time today gnashing teeth.
>
> It's food for thought. Certainly, that could prove to be confusing to
> a student in Beginning Scheme who does a search, and discovers there
> are several bazillion hits on the term 'structure' if they switch to
> "Pretty Big" instead of "Beginner Scheme." But I thought I would offer
> it up all the same.
>
> Cheers,
> Matt
> _________________________________________________
>   For list-related administrative tasks:
>   http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>