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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
an endless discussion thread about what features to include.
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
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Go for it, and do it right! (Score:2)
Sounds like a great idea to me. I wish someone had taught me scheme at 11. I'd say do everything as functional as you can, though; no imperative style. That will be easy enough to learn later.
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
Re:Go for it, and do it right! (Score:1)
I think that strictly speaking, even sequencing operations is procedural, not functional.
So,
...) ...) ...)
(html-meta
(html-table
(html-footer
Is essentially procedural in nature.
The functional way to do this, I believe, would be something like:
(map html-gen
'((meta parm1 parm2 parm3)
(table parm1 parm2 parm3)
(footer parm1 parm2 parm3)))
Maybe I
Re:Go for it, and do it right! (Score:2)
I'm not as into Lisp and functional programming as I want to be, so I can't provide expert insight. All I can say is what I wish. :)
Definitely search out Paul Graham's material on the net and absorb.
Should I really go to the trouble of eliminating sequencing?
I am not educated enough to say on that, yet.
If I'm going to go this route, no setq's either. Just call the outer driver with literal lists.
I do think avoiding setq's is good.
I learned scheme followed by Lisp, and the way I was taught made it impossible to know you had an alternative to programming functionally until you learned otherwise. But that was 1998, and unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to use it all. It wasn't until recently I started hearing things that made me think, "If I want to make myself a hacker, I must learn functional programming and actually use it for a real project some day."
Another issue along the 'purity' lines is should I introduce function definition with the convenience syntax: (define (x a) ...)
or
(define x (lambda(a) ...))
I learned it with the second syntax, and it has always made more sense to me that way.
Maybe I should find a Scheme forum to discuss this, like comp.lang.scheme.
Bah! There are plenty of scheme programmers here (and I'm not talking about folks like me who can't remember 90% of what they learned). There's even a scheme compiler for parrot, I think. By all means seek out the other forum, but don't take the discussion away from here! :)
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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Re:Go for it, and do it right! (Score:1)
I'm familiar with Paul Graham, but from what I can tell, he leans heavily toward Common Lisp and is pretty advanced. I prefer stuff like SICP [mit.edu], HtDP [htdp.org], the refreshingly simple TYSiFD [neu.edu] and The Scheme Programming Language [scheme.com]. All online! None of these texts is appropriate for my 11 year old, but I'm using some of their approaches as inspiration.