From: grzegorz@... (Grzegorz Chrupala) Date: 2003-10-04T08:12:37+09:00 Subject: Re: Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme Rene van Bevern wrote in message news:... > I know at least one more person who came to LISP/Scheme over ruby. Maybe > it needs ruby and python to enlighten people without confusing them with > a syntax they are not used to first. ;) I can't remember how *exactly* I came to use scheme (unfortuantely I don't keep a diary), but trying to reconstruct it looks something like this: I am actually not a programmer, but mostly a linguist. About four years ago I got interested in computational linguistics and decided to learn a programming language. The first programming book I picked up was "The Gentle Introduction..." (Common Lisp). I made sense to me but I couldn't find a plug'n' play lisp implementation (I was pretty computer-illiterate at the time: could only manage v. basic stuff on Windoze). So I put that aside and decided to have a go at Perl (widely used in NLP). That was much easier, I installed the ActiveState win32 port no problems and picked Perl up from online tutorials and the multitude of other easily accessible Perl resources. After I've played with perl for a while I heard about Python and Ruby, which to me looked like more sophisticated versions of Perl, and I switched to Ruby for most of my toy and not-so-toy scripts. While reading ruby-talk and other ruby-stuff I kept coming across references to Scheme and Lisp, which I was already vaguely familiar with from my perusal of the "Gentle Introduction". At this point I was already using Linux and so could easily install Clisp and half a dozen Scheme implementations. Schemes such as Gauche, Bigloo and PLT seemed like they were better suited to writing the sort of small programs or CGI scripts that I was using Perl and Ruby for, so I sort of settled for Scheme. (Sometime during this time I also learned Prolog in a university course and it made me aware of the various advantages, as well as some disadvantages, of using a very high level languages in comp-ling). At the moment I am quite happy with Scheme although I do miss the large lively communities and the amout of libraries associated with Perl, Python and Ruby. I hope the "revival" of Lisp-like languages some of you have observed will gain momentum and that CL anb Scheme will catch up with Python and Ruby in the areas where they are behind. Cheers, -- Grzegorz