[PRL] How about Tues 200-300 for macro reading group?

[Doug Orleans]

John Clements writes:
 > 
 > On Sep 13, 2004, at 7:07 PM, Doug Orleans wrote:

(By the way, I sent this message before realizing that I was
subscribed with a different address, so it got held for approval
overnight; meanwhile, I re-subscribed and sent a longer version, which
included my code rewrite.  That's why you may have seen two copies.)

 > So: Doug has demonstrated that you can write perl-ish code in Scheme.  
 > Why don't we do it?  Which one would you rather maintain?

I think the Perl-ish mindset is to write something quickly to get the
job done, and don't worry about whether it's maintainable.  So the
latter question is probably not too relevant to this case (unless you
want to argue that all code ought to be potentially re-usable and thus
maintainable, which I might even agree with).  For the former
question, I do in fact kluge up little Scheme programs to do
quick-and-dirty tasks, and I think others here do too, if that's what
you mean by Perl-ish; on the other hand, Jeff's script seemed
especially brittle to me (using string comparisons for figuring out
which time slots had conflicts), and I wonder if there's something
about Perl that encourages this style.  So my question is, why don't
people write more Scheme-ish code in Perl?

--dougo at place.org