Re: Syntatic sugar and identifier permissivity

[Lalo Martins <lalo at hackandroll dot org>]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 10:43:53AM +0200, Mikael Djurfeldt wrote:
> 
> I think this is a question of getting used to it.  It seems to me to
> be a rather optimal way of using Scheme syntax to express accessing an
> object.

The problem is that people just won't use it. If they have to
"get used to it" they will just use something more close to
what they are already used. Everything people need to "get used
to" needs some help on the learning curve or they will just not
bother.

> This may not be at all how you arrived at this syntax, but maybe
> you're influenced by class-centered object systems.  In an
> operation-centered object system, like GOOPS, I think (bar foo) is a
> more natural way of accessing a component of an object.

Mikael, like it or not, class-centered object systems *ARE* OOP
"proper". The definition of OOP includes the fact that "objects
contain data and code". Generics are a different technique,
which can be used to emulate traditional OOP and thus are
considered OOP when used for this.

But regardless of this meta-discussion, what happens is that
class-centered is what people are used to, and if they have to
learn something completely different they just won't, most of
the time. How many projects are actually using Guile right now?
Including GNU projects?


I'm beginning to feel Guile doesn't really care about whether
people use it or not. It definitely feels more like an
"academic" project than something for everyone to use on a
day-to-day basis; more like an effort to have a really cool
Scheme implementation (which, as nice as it is, would mean
zilch for the majority of the computer users in the world) than
an flexible extension/scripting tool.

Which is a pity.

[]s,
                                               |alo
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