Am I getting Scheme wrong?

Posted by nischayn22 on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by nischayn22
Published on 2012-06-28T06:42:49Z Indexed on 2012/06/28 9:22 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 250

Filed under:

functional-programming

|

Scheme

Inspired by the numerous posts about the importance of learning Lisp/Scheme I started to learn Scheme two days back, I am using the book "The little Schemer" and have completed half of it.

But I still haven't learned anything new, the book teaches about recursion which I already understand and uses lambda (which I can think of a way to define a function in C). I still haven't got the concept of functional programming (please point to some example of functional compared to normal programming methods in C/C++ so I can get it).

Am I learning in the wrong way? or is "The little Schemer" for a newbie in programming and I should look for some other books?

© Programmers or respective owner

Related posts about functional-programming

Introducing functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming… >>> More
Functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming… >>> More
Does functional programming mandate new naming conventions?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I recently started studying functional programming using Haskell and came upon this article on the official Haskell wiki: How to read Haskell. The article claims that short variable names such as x, xs, and f are fitting for Haskell code, because of conciseness and abstraction. In essence, it claims… >>> More
pitfalls/disadvantages of functional programming

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
When would you NOT want to use functional programming? What is it not so good at? I am more looking for disadvantages of the paradigm as a whole, not things like "not widely used", or "no good debugger available". Those answers may be correct as of now, but they deal with FP being a new concept (an… >>> More
Should functional programming be taught before imperative programming?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
It seems to me that functional programming is a great thing. It eliminates state and makes it much easier to automatically make code run in parallel. Many programmers who were first taught imperative programming styles find it very difficult to learn functional programming, because it is so different… >>> More

Related posts about Scheme

About "If.." in Scheme (plt-scheme)

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I had a pretty simple requirement in my Scheme program to execute more than one statement, in the true condition of a 'if'. . So I write my code, something like this: (if (= 1 1) ((expression1) (expression2)) ; these 2 expressions are to be executed when the condition is true (expression3)… >>> More
Detecting EOF in a Binary File using Scheme

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
(define (read-all-input) (local ((define line (bytes->list (read-bytes 4)))) (if (eof-object? line) empty (cons line (read-all-input))))) (void (read-all-input)) The above code fails because bytes-list expects an argument of type byte string, but is given # >>> More
Scheme: Detecting duplicate elements in a list

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Does R6RS or Chez Scheme v7.9.4 have a library function to check if a list contains duplicate elements? Alternatively, do either have any built in functionality for sets (which dis-allow duplicate elements)? So far, I've only been able to find an example here. The problem with that is that it doesn't… >>> More
Scheme implementations - what does it mean?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, I'm a beginning student in CS, and my classes are mostly in Java. I'm currently going through "Little Schemer" as a self study, and in the process of finding out how to do that I have found numerous references to "implementations" of Scheme. My question is, what are implementations? Are they… >>> More
Traversing Scheme function as a list

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Isn't it possible to treat functions in Scheme as any other list? Basically, what I want do to is something like this: (define (foo) "hello") (cdr foo) ; or similar, should return the list ((foo) "hello") I've found a similar discussion about this, and I feel a bit disappointed if this is not… >>> More