[plt-scheme] Re: from hell to paradise

Grant Rettke wrote:

> I am arguing that if "we" want to see FP adopted; it needs to be
> presented in a manner that is deemed acceptable to the mainstream.
> Siebel and RWH are two books that do this. If we want to see Scheme
> adopted; then this is what needs to happen. That is my understanding
> of the market.

Fair enough. I note that it was not Guy Steele who wrote "Practical 
Common Lisp" and it was not Simon Peyton-Jones who wrote "Real-World 
Haskell". If someone wants to tackle "Real Practical Scheme" based on 
v4, the hostility from the factionalized community alone is likely to 
doom it, but on purely technical grounds, there is plenty of material.

But it is not clear to me that today's enthusiasm for Haskell and Erlang 
(or, for that matter, Ruby) because one can do "real things" in them is 
sustainable. Maybe to an educator everything looks like education, but I 
suspect that the main benefit of Haskell is that it is highly attractive 
to some highly intelligent people, and the main benefit of Erlang is in 
learning how to do concurrency right before going off and fixing up 
something written in a mixture of other languages by a mixture of other 
people.

In other words, I would caution against superficial effects that are as 
easily reversed as they were provoked. --PR