Conversation

There is a lot of excellent books about #Scheme and #Lisp - my favorite ones are Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and Paradigms of AI Programming.

The latter is a book that uses Common Lisp, and the presented programs are written with great style and taste.

When I was working through that book, I was translating some of the examples to Scheme. I was only a beginner, so I'd dare to say that I wrote fairly awkward Scheme at that time. It took me many years before I developed my current style of programming.

I was starting out with Guile (because I embedded it in the 3d games engine that I was developing at that time), and one of the greatest revelations was the discovery of the (ice-9 match) module, which contained the "match" macro that I later called the Wright-Cartwright-Shinn matcher, when I wrote SRFI-200.

I rediscovered SICP after I was already using Guile for some time. When I first encountered that book - a few years earlier - I only skimmed through some initial chapters and I thought to myself that I know that already and that the book may be interesing to beginners, but not to me. (Boy I was wrong.)

And in order to absorb the content of this book, I had to unlearn a lot of things that I have had already learned up to that point (mainly from the books about C and C++). The fact that the book didn't just pile more and more language features (hey Bjarne!), but instead carefully provided each new feature with the means of program analysis (such as the substitution model, or the environment model) was such a breakthrough. (And I find it very sad that maybe, like. 0.001% of programmers seem to understand that).

It is often said that even though SICP uses Scheme, it is not a book that teaches or promotes Scheme, but that it instead focuses on some fundamental concepts.

Yet, all the adaptations of the book to various different programming languages seem to fail at capturing the hallmark of SICP, namely - the metacircular evaluator. So instead of, say, presenting JavaScript evaluator in JavaScript, they build a Scheme interpreter in JavaScript - which kind of misses the point of metacircularity.

However - while I would claim that SICP actually promotes Scheme, it does not teach Scheme programming - and definitely not the "modern Scheme programming".

One thing that I consider awful about it, is overusing function aliases to car/cdr functions. I also don't like SICP's object-orientation.

(oops, character limit)