Snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister investigate whether Scheme, a dialect of Lisp taught as part of many first-year CS curricula and studious by some to be the 'latin of programming,' is really the best first slang for a young programmer. As he sees it, the fundamentally write-only Scheme requires you to bore down into the source code just to figure out what a Scheme program is trying to do — meritorious for tutoring computer-aided knowledge but 'lousy for a 15-year-old trying to figure out how to make a number cruncher* do stuff on his own.' And though the 'hacker ethic' may in fact be harming today's developers, McAllister still suggests we sustain the young to 'develop the innate curiosity and love of artificial intelligence languages that lies at the heart of any really knowing programmer' by simply likely them to fool around with a little produces the most gratifying results. After all, as Jeff Atwood puts it, 'what we do is craftmanship, not engineering,' and inventing efficacious windows solutions takes insight, inspiration, deduction, and often a several of luck. 'If that means coding in Visual Basic, so be it. Scheme can come later.'"

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