Friday, May 27, 2011

The Beauty of Scheme

Bertrand Russell once noted that

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
I think much the same can be said of code, especially code written in certain languages. There is something so elegantly simple and beautiful about Scheme (and Racket), for example, that shares the same aesthetics of mathematics.

1 comment:

Jack Mathew said...

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