Hmm…
When checking out recent Lisp books, I realized that one of the reasons that makes SICP palatable is the fact that it’s “old”. I mean that in a good way. It predates Java, Python, Ruby, etc, and as a result, it does not adopt a smug attitude like, “Lisp is so much better than all these imitators that stole features from it but lack the essence”. Modern Lisp texts often seem to have a hard time keeping this attitude at bay, which makes for unpleasant reading when you’re coming from a different language (which is almost always the case).
Then again, from what I have seen, this attitude is less prevalent in the Scheme community…
Za3k said,
March 24, 2010 @ 10:54 pm
Have you read Paul Graham? He comes off that way very strongly, and I’d say he’s a large part of both the Scheme and LISP community.
I don’t actually mind it.
I am very slightly annoyed that languages are adopting Scheme’s features, because they’re *nearly* as good as Scheme, and at the same time have better communities and libraries. The reason I’m annoyed is because this means I have a hard time convincing people to let me use Scheme. I’m hoping either it becomes more popular, or popular languages pick up the rest of the features I enjoy like macros (and continuations, and lexical scoping, and closures, and …)