I think you're misunderstanding the primary motivation, which is not to produce something which is useful but something which is comprehensible, in as small a piece of code as possible. I'm perfectly happy with your assertion that scheme is not the most practical of languages for doing real work, but the real attraction of Scheme is that it is internally a thing of great beauty, like a piece of clockwork, and something that with a little effort can be grasped in its entirity.

A second reason for chosing Scheme was that the proposed "Part II" of the book, on parsing, would make a very clear distinction between the various external syntaxes of languages and a far more conservative core of internal forms, and would point out that in the case of scheme there is little or no difference between the external and the internal form (which is why it's so easy to parse).

Choosing Perl as the Implementation language was a no-brainer for me because I use it all day every day in any case; and the "Part III" on compilation could justifiably target Parrot, which would be an additional selling point.

In reply to Re^2: RFC: Almost a Book by billh
in thread RFC: Almost a Book by billh

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