Comment by zelphirkalt

Why would the students be confused? By what exactly?

> This "everything looks the same" property of Scheme and of all LISP-like languages is a bug, not a feature.

But you are mixing up things here. There are things that look different. Most things in Scheme can be understood as function calls and match that syntax, but there is different syntax for define, let, cond, if, and others. Not everything looks the same. What you might actually mean is, that everything is made of s-expressions. That is actually very helpful, when you work with code. It makes it very easy to move things around, especially in comparison to languages like Python, with significant whitespace indentation.

> When the semantics is different, humans need the syntax to be different.

I learned multiple languages before Scheme, and they did leave their scars, but I find, that I do not need syntax to be that much different. Maybe I am not human.

> In contrast, LISP/Scheme make everything look the same. It is quite hard to even tell a noun from a verb.

Is that a feature of the English language? I have rarely had this issue in Scheme. Perhaps it is because I think a lot about names when naming things.

> This makes learning it and teaching it hard, not easy.

Maybe I only had bad classes and lectures before reading SICP on my own, but I found, that I learned much more from it than most teaching before that was able to teach me.

> Brian is selling a fantasy here. If you think Scheme is so great, look at this nightmare of examples showing the various ways to implement the factorial function in Scheme: https://erkin.party/blog/200715/evolution/

And what exactly is your criticism?

That there are many ways of writing the function? That is a property of many general purpose programming languages. For example we could look at something like Ruby, where it has become part of the design to allow you many ways to do the same thing.

Or the richness of programming concepts available in Scheme? Is that a bad thing? I think not. You don't have to use every single one of them. No one forces you to. But am I glad to have them available, when have a good reason to use them.

Surely you are aware, that the page you link to is at least partially in jest?

> All of this "abstractions first, reality second" agenda is just a special case of what I call "The Pathology of the Modern": the pathological worship of the abstract over the concrete. Everything modernism touches turns into shit. I am done with living in modernist shit and I hope you are too.

I don't know where you got the idea, that SICP lauds "abstractions first, reality second". This is not the essence of SICP. SICP invents abstractions, once it shows, that some previous approach was not sufficient. A good example is the whole "develop a package" thing, where piece by piece the requirements grow and data directed programming is introduced.