I’ve spent a couple of hours reading a currently running thread in comp.lang.scheme entitled Scheme as a religion, started with a delicious typo:
As an avoid [sic] computer science student who hopes to attend to UC Berkeley…
The post goes on in an uninformed and superficial critique of Scheme, which is more or less dismissed as something whose time is over. In other newsgroups, such a beginning would have quickly degenerated into a don’t-feed-the-troll flamefest, but not in c.l.s. Instead, lots of insightful posts have followed. One of them has pointed me to two jewels (co)authored by Guy Steel: his Ph.D. thesis (i didn’t know that it is available online) and The Evolution of Lisp (with Richard P. Gabriel). Wonderful stuff. And a great community.
