Re: SD4F: (exist? procedure-**maximum**-arity)

[Blake Shaw <blake@nonconstructivism.com>]

Olivier Dion <olivier.dion@polymtl.ca> writes:

> Out of topic here, but what's your first impression of the book?  I was
> thinking of asking it for my birthday :-)

As someone whose introduction to scheme was sicp about a year ago, which
I spent about three months with only moving forward after solving each 
problem, getting my ass kicked every few sets of exercises (some taking
a week!) until I decided to just do a cursory overview of the rest of
the material from Chapter 4 onwards, so far SD4F has been fantastic.

So far it's a lot of the same ideas from sicp, but instead of traversing the
entire gamut of programming it's focused on one objective: explaining
how to write the most generic, composable, maintainable and reusable
software possible. So in a sense, it feels like a "refined, abbreviated,
applied sicp follow-up".

Not to say SICP isn't geared towards application of ideas, because it
absolutely is, but the first exercises don't, for example, ask that you
prove Ackermann's function. So far it sticks to the practical aspect of
software design, and has been easy to follow. As someone new to scheme
it seems like the first text I've encountered that doesn't only teach
scheme but teaches how to design software in scheme. Highly recommended!

-- 
“In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni”