scheme

In the weekends I like to learn lisp (my favorite lisp is scheme), and, whilst I do it in a chaotic fashion, I end up actually learning. Today I'm reading about continuations, a theme that is mentioned over and over in schemeland and which I hadn't the guts to try and understand. Until I found this chapter in the book "Teach yourself scheme in fixnum days". As eye-opening as it is, what I found most surprising is that ruby also has continuation! So I'll sum up what I learned about continuations using ruby for the examples. All the examples and content are either paraphrased or taken directly from the above book.

This might come off as yet another developer ranting against java, so let me state this before even stating my goal today: I think java is a neat language which shows off some good ideas that have clearly influenced the programming community for the past years. But, as highly as I think of java as a kinda good designed product and harbinger of very nice things, like the java virtual machine (cradle of fine languages like scala and clojure)and the widespread use of just-in-time compilation, I consider that teaching it as a first programming language is harmful, because in teaching it you have two choices: either delve into thorough and sometimes hard explanations as to why things have to be done the way they're done or resort to magical explanations: "write it like that because I say so". And both have equally pejorative consequences: the former leaves little time to teach the fundamentals of programming, like control flow, functions, recursion, environments/computational objects, logic and testing; and the latter sets a rather weak foundation which dooms the future of future engineers/computer scientists.