no value in Scheme

or any of the other weird languages. This is a sweeping exaggeration,
but it's been mostly true for me.

Why me? Almost 3 years ago, I had a train wreck with 3D graphics, C++,
and a spherical hexified icosahedron. This was during the dot.com
bust. It pretty much ended whatever semblance of a career I had, and
ultimately led me to bankruptcy. C++ was pretty clearly a failure for
"geometric glue" problems, i.e. knocking together structural
relationships quickly. C++ was also a lousy prototyping language.
Really the only thing C++ has going for it is speed, at the expense of
pain. And familiarity.

Familiarity.

I thought, "Should I use a better language?" I thought, "Should I use
other people's open source code?" I spent nearly the next 3 years
pursuing both avenues. This has led me... nowhere. Well, ok, I'm
wiser in the theoretical underpinnings of computerdom. But that's it.
I have nothing else to show for it. From a productivity standpoint,
chasing the unfamiliar has been a complete waste of time.

I can't honestly tell anybody to use advanced programming languages.
The tools associated with them often suck, because they lack critical
mass. Maybe that's not true in some problem domains, maybe some
problem domains are well trodden and one gets along fine. It's a
really lousy situation in 3D graphics though. Let's face it, the rest
of the world is doing C++ and only mavericks ever try anything else.
It's a disappointing reality but if you piss in the wind long enough
and hard enough, you realize how wet and stinky and yellow you are.

The learning curves, both for new language paradigms and for the tools,
are long. It wouldn't be so bad if Scheme were industry standard, if
we all started on it back in college, if all the tools were written in
it, and we just had years and years and years of tedious leveraged
experience. I don't see any fundamental barriers to understanding
Scheme. But it takes a long time, and the learning curve everyone else
invested in is C/C++. Why should I ever tell a proficient C/C++
programmer to drop what he's doing and do something else?

Sure, every program over X size has invented half of Lisp / Scheme
whatever in it. THAT MAY VERY WELL BE FASTER AND MORE PRODUCTIVE than
bothering with completely different languages and toolchains. I mean,
what kind of stuff could I have written in 3 years if I had continued
with the crappy inelegant C++ *** I already had to start with?

There's no money in this. There's no business model in this. There's
only endless chasing around and around of yet another broken tool. Yet
another clumsy solution that 1 guy on the internet cooked up somewhere,
that sorta works, or sorta doesn't. Open Source is described by some
as "Open Sores."

Am I done with Scheme? Oddly enough, not yet. You see, I think the
entire computer industry is complete ***. So, I might as well use
Scheme! I'm merely *wishing* that it was possible for me to have kept
going, 3 years ago, with that C++ torture code. But it wasn't. It was
too shitty. So I went out and found other ways to do things that are
shitty. Different kind of shit. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Maybe I will eventually say been there, done that, and collect all 10
t-shirts. For now, I'm more optimistic about turning Scheme into
something that isn't ***, than I am about C++. C++ is an evolutionary
dead end; Scheme is an invitation to do buckets more work in the hope
of *someday* realizing something that isn't ***.

Man was I a fool to think I could take on all these problems of
industry single handedly. When you don't have a paycheck for your
computer work, and no kind of student support either, and you have to
hold an irrelevant day job to stay afloat, you realize how totally
overwhelming, unproductive, and completely shitty the entire world of
computerdom is. Big bucks are the only lubrication that make it
palatable. Well, unless there's a way to run off to the Third World
where it's cheap, so I can sit around and code and not be bothered for
a long time....

Oh, and yes I still run SeaFunc. And it still meets every 3 weeks, and
plenty of really good functional programmers attend it. It doesn't
require me, it has a life of its own, I could hand over the
announcement job to someone else at any time. Oh, and I'm still
working on CMake builds for Chicken Scheme. Chicken hasn't
specifically failed me yet; there's just way more work to "put things
right" on Windows than I ever wanted there to be. If I had had
foresight, I might not have done it. In hindsight, I've made progress,
so I keep going.

I'm just done pretending that all of this is anything but historical
circumstance. I'm on a trajectory, which I think will eventually lead
me to The Way. I just think it's going to be years in coming. Things
are that bad. Do you ever wake up and realize just how bad all this
computer stuff really is? How cottage industry it all is? We're in
the stone ages. We're not that far above sticking wires into boards
and making little beeps and blips.

BEEP!
<boop>

BEEP!
<boop>

Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
- anonymous entrepreneur

.