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0 pointsb0rsuk6y ago0 comments

I think the target audience is people who don't like to learn, and I find that worrying in the context of programming.

It's not like code examples in a book are intentionally obfuscated. They are also not some atrocious pile of spaghetti code you may have to put up with at work. I think any foreign PL programming book is a joy to read next to working as a software maintainer. And while the original book aspires to be a general programming book (the title!), I think we should allow Scheme programmers to have their poster child book/success story.

I also have a modest, optimistic interest in Rust, and tinker with it from time to time, but I don't think everything should be converted to Rust. The language team is open about sacrificing readability for other values, like execution speed, memory safety, concurrency, correctness. But with Rust at least the occasional rewriting hype can be justified as "testing the limits of the new language" and "optimizing" - because the language is pretty damn efficient. With Javascript it's... what? Some kind of idealism about running all programs in a browser sandbox? And isn't it a bit ironic that an idealistic book about software architecture is rewritten in an ad-hoc language, with a minefield of bad features you're not supposed to use but you will encounter at work?

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slimed6y ago

> I think the target audience is people who don't like to learn, and I find that worrying in the context of programming.

A strange comment to make about someone trying to tackle a text like this

> I also have a modest, optimistic interest in Rust, and tinker with it from time to time, but I don't think everything should be converted to Rust.

This is a great example of how your perspective differs from that of the intended audience. They don't want the book in JS because it's a language they're already picking up and want to tinker with. It's likely one of the only languages they are confident with. Maybe they just finished their CS degree or (gasp) a coding bootcamp and would like to understand more of the fundamentals before learning their second language. Especially one like LISP that represents an entirely separate branch of programming language design from JavaScript.

As someone who writes Clojure professionally, I certainly share your hope they would choose to pick up lisp eventually. Let's not hamper their development in the meantime by steering them away from resources like this that might assist their journey.