[geeks] I want this....

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 09:21:54PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Wed, 22 May 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> > Hey, watch your mouth.  Scheme is one of the greatest languages ever.  
> 
> Scheme is a good language, yes.  But, using it for problems where
> imperative languages like C would be a natural choice is just silly.
> There's a mindset by some that all pointers are evil, all compiled code is
> evil, and the notion of a "machine" is a broken abstraction.  All the
> world is not a nail.
> 
> The same goes for Java and C, of course, even if I do everything in C,
> anyway. :)

Scheme doesn't think that pointers are evil.  It just thinks that everything
is a pointer.
 
> > If only would get some darn bindings for it.  For starters, I'd like
> > to see scheme48 to wxwindows/fltk/tk/whatever bindings for every
> > platform that both packages exist on (windows, linux, other unix,
> > probably not Mac, unfortunately).
> 
> DrScheme has wxwindows bindings on Unix, Windows, MacOS, Linux, and *BSD.
> If I'm going to pimp Scheme, I might as well recommend my own school's
> Scheme.  It's also available under the LGPL.

I didn't know it was available on linux.  I'll have to take a poke when I
have some spare time.
 
> Yeah, but for anything over about three hours, I'd rather take the train.
> Those are N hours that I could be reading, coding, or sleeping, rather
> than dealing with New England traffic.

For me, 6 hours of driving (3 hours each way) is usually a lot cheaper than
the train. 
 
> I wouldn't have survived.  The coursework doesn't seem to be that much
> harder than Rice, but the overall mindset would've driven me insane. There
> are really good, really bright people there, but they're drowned out by
> the "I go to MIT, so I must be l337!  X11 is the best example of
> well-written code out there!  Athena Unix[1] can beat up your Unix any
> day!" crowd.

Well, the MIT presenter was cute.  I used to think it would be cool to be
at the Media Lab.  But, as the years have gone by, I've realized that the
Media Lab people are stuck up prigs.  They barely release papers, let alone
code.

I think I could keep up with the CS work at Rice or MIT, but I barely passed
the required math courses here.  I don't know how I would have gotten through
at MIT or Rice.  At Penn State, they just required too many darn science
courses in addition to the math and CS stuff.  I thought I wanted more 
liberal arts stuff.  Well, I liked some of my liberal arts courses (the art,
two of the 3 philosophy classes, miscellaneous other things), but now I'm
fed up with inanity of some of them.  Econ classes were a total waste of 
time.  And they have this "perspective" requirement.  And they are making
me take bio or chem instead of additional physics.  Sigh.  Only 7 more months.
 
> I actually was talking with an MIT student once while visiting Teresa, and
> he commented on how beautiful the X11 code was, and how the Athena widgets
> package blew GTK+ out of the water.  How do you respond to something like
> that?  Especially when all your favorite LARTs are at home?

All right, I have to admit, I like Athena widgets.  But they aren't complete
enough.  I don't believe they have internationalization support.  They aren't
really good for anything more than cheap hacks, if even that.  Didn't Motif
come from MIT also?  Even that is better than Athena.

Personally, I rather like X11, but then, I don't mess with the parts that
drive others insane.  I do wish that NeWS had survived.

> [1] If you don't know, you don't want to.  Trust me on this one.  I'd
>     rather use Cygwin on Windows 95 than that pile of shit.  Thank your
>     favorite diety that it's remained in academia and hasn't escaped to
>     the real world.

I've heard of the athena project, and of varios pieces of it.  I didn't 
know that they called it unix though.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd