Interview: Bruce Lewis on Web Develpment with Scheme

blog.lawnelephant.com

23 pointsantiismist3 comments

(Disclosure: I was present on the Etherpad when this happened.)

Fave quote from the interview:

"If you want to do [some tricky thing related to grouping photos] the code looks really messy. It’s not rocket science, but it’s painful. Macros hide that pain really nicely. I actually enjoy grouping results. I have fun doing database-driven web programming. A lot of good things don’t get implemented on the web because they’re not fun."

That was my favorite part of the interview too. It sort of flips around the issue of something being "hard". I.E. how can a language be built to make hard problems easier, as opposed to how to use a language to solve a hard problem.

I agree; his next answer really hits dead on for me: "power is about what becomes palatable to the programmer". This reminds me of the "conciseness conjecture" from On the expressive power of programming languages by Matthias Felleisen (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/article/felleisen90expressive.ht...). I offer the (sub-)conjecture that palatability and concision are correlated.

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