Re: peasant revolt against DrScheme!

[Matthias Felleisen <matthias@cs.rice.edu>]

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   Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 09:32:16 -0500 (EST)
   From: Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu>
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   Will Fitzgerald wrote:

   > Has anyone taught a course where BOTH Scheme and C (or C++) is taught?

   Rice did for many years, maybe still does.  But not in a realistic
   setting.  The (first) course is primarily in Scheme (the content is
   that of How to Design Programs), but the labs cover C programming.
   They do not teach idiomatic C so much as a very watchful dialect and
   style that is roughly the result of mapping Scheme down to C.

   I don't recall the C taught in this course assuaging anyone.  Those
   who didn't know it were probably told by their elders that they
   weren't *really* learning it, while those who did know it already knew 
   way more tricks than the TAs would even admit to knowing in public.
   The primary reason for doing both was 

   (a) to provide survival skills for, say, engineers who wandered over;

Nope. I never thought these students would learn enough C from this. But
someone had made a compromise on this in the late 80s, and we had to live
by it. 

   and 
   (b) to demonstrate the physical vs algebraic models of computing
   (Corky Cartwright and Matthias Felleisen's formulation of the structure
   of CS).

Again, no. My approach to teach structure of computing with a 'physical' vs
'algebraic' world view was easily supported with my machine simulator,
machine language, and assembly language. I just happened to squeeze in C at
that point because Corky insisted we accept the compromise with engineering
(as if that would have ever mattered to them). 

-- Matthias