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by vinayms
2548 days ago
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I am self taught in C++. I learnt it when I realized my BE FORTRAN wasn't going to enable creating GUI simulation. I did have a few hiccups like any beginner but soon it was alright, so have no idea what it is like to be formally taught in class. As for Lisp and ML, being Indian, I had no access to these, even in CS section of the library, as you might understand. Many years ago I tried learning Scheme by/after watching the lecture series. I even have the book SICP. It is fun and elegant, refreshingly so, no doubt, but only till a point. I found once we venture into necessity for conditionals & data mutation, its unbearably cumbersome - I can deal with spaghetti C code but not this - may be I am conditioned by exclusive C++ usage. I tend to think those who stick to Scheme like languages and solve real world problems do it for bravado and cry when no one is looking lol. As for design pattern, I don't see it being exclusive to OO. Its just a bunch of ideas to build software. One would have it for assembler as well if it was used for mass production (I wonder how it was in early days when it was exclusively assembler). Its certainly poorly used and abused, agreed. |
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I understand being in the same situation myself.
>>I tend to think those who stick to Scheme like languages and solve real world problems do it for bravado and cry when no one is looking lol.
That's mostly because of lack of libraries and the amount of reading one has to do to learn totally new way(ironically the original way) of doing things. Data structures are linked lists(lists), stacks(lists with utility functions), queues(lists with utility functions), trees(list of lists), heaps(list of lists), graph(interconnected lists). Basically dealing with data structures is List processing, hence the name Lisp. Now since building lists using Lisp with recursion gets easier because of amazing native facilities that come with Lisp. These things just get a whole lot easier. A lot of people will tell you they see that moment of enlightenment when they learn recursion in Lisp. It just feels like the concept was always there and you discovered it neatly while work through it.
SML and its descendants are the same, additionally you get the same enlightenment with Type systems.
When you read through Lisp, and then work with DS/Algo you begin to feel, the entirety of DS/Algo work was invented, grown and perfected in a totally different set of tools and thinking philosophies and then artificially shoe horned into C languages.
In the modern context Clojure and F# come across as nice replacements. Tons of libraries and good documentation/books are available for help.
OTOH a lot of great work is done in modern incarnations of Lisp and ML. Including mission critical large software stuff. This is because of strong typing in languages like F#, and code compression using macros in Lisp. Clojure is also designed to solve a lot of big problems that effect software development at large.
One of the things I realized while working with Python after using SML. When using Python I was running a kind of buggy type inference engine in my brain, then write unit tests cases to validate it. No human should do things that can automated with a computer. That includes programming itself.
Someday people will look at type systems, macros and recursion the same way as we look at garbage collection. If a computer can do it, and it can do it better than you. It is criminal to spend human effort doing it.
This is really the digging with shovels equivalent of writing code. Let the compiler work for you.