My Journey To Scheme

I had been wanting to program for awhile. Since I was very little of course when I was about 10. I started off with Visual Basic which is such a depressing programming language. I lamented in a great deal of depressing programming languages for awhile. From VB to Java to HTML to javascript and the list would go on almost indefinitely. Until one fateful day I discovered lisp. The odd syntax really made me wonder what it was and how to program in it. After awhile I started to understand scheme and really got into learning it. It wasn't a depressing programming language at all but an elegant one. Something I hadn't seen in a programming language when I started learning it. For example lets compair two programs in scheme and Java.

Java Programming language

 
public class Hello {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, world!");
    }
}

Scheme Programming language

(display "Hello World")

As you can see both are quite different. For example scheme uses prefix notation with parenthesis while Java uses a C like syntax. Also Java forces a object oriented system down your throat. The advantage to a prefix notation is that it is easly understood what does what. Display acts upon the argument "Hello World" and displays it. Java on the other hand makes you use the object system integrated in the language. That is one of the reasons that the Java program is much larger. This doesn't mean that Scheme can't have an object system but it could possibly have.