> I had previously abandoned using Scheme because, frankly, I ran out of free time for exploratory programming.
But they find Common Lisp acceptable. In what way are Schemes more "exploratory" than Common Lisp? Isn't that exactly what the author says they like about CL (REPL driven development)?
Sorry that was unclear. What I meant was: a while back, I was exploring Scheme (motivated by SICP) and then ran out of free time. Now, I’ve got some free time again and want to try Common Lisp because of the REPL-driven workflow.
i found the repl driven workflow intriguing but i could never get into it. i am not an emacs user and the vim integration wasn't as good as slime promises to be and i couldn't really get comfortable running lisp from within vim. not ssure, i probably didn't try to hard.
smalltalk on the other hand made this a lot easier. not repl driven but having an actual UI to manage code and handling errors it provides the same ability to fix issues at runtime without restarting but with a nicer interface to manage the code.
Yes, CL is extremely pragmatic. And Scheme was invented specifically as a pedagogical tool, so everything is much cleaner. At least until you install scm-utils, and find that it added an entire computer algebra system and physics simulation system and so on. :)
> I had previously abandoned using Scheme because, frankly, I ran out of free time for exploratory programming.
But they find Common Lisp acceptable. In what way are Schemes more "exploratory" than Common Lisp? Isn't that exactly what the author says they like about CL (REPL driven development)?