Re: peasant revolt against DrScheme!

[Reini Urban <rurban@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at>]

Daniel Mahler schrieb:
> I did not want to contribute to the non plt traffic on this list,
> but his is a very good point.
> Over ten years ago Latrobe University in Australia
> did something nasty to their 1st year CS students.
> about the first month or two they taught assemler.
> (a simplified none running on an emulater on the vaxes
>  kind of like Core Wars).
> After making them do an assignment implementing
> BCD arithmetic, they introduced them to Pascal.
> Boy did the students love Pascal!
> What is more, it was real easy to explain things
> like call by value vs call by reference to them
> (they knew if not understood addressing modes).
> One could even talk to them about call stacks
> and what tail recusion optimization is about.
> I have met quiet a few people, including AI profs,
> who thought that writing tail reacusive code was always good,
> even in Franz Lisp (which did no optimization as far as I know)
> and in lazy functional languages like Miranda and Haskell,
> where it just force strictness and cuts out the benefits of lazyness.

> As ancient cultures well know,
> traumatizing adolescents leads to enlightened adults :)

Hmm, I wouldn't agree with this point at all. (Jacob probably as well)
The point with scheme or simplier lisps (I teach AutoLISP), 
is that it is less powerful, (dare to say even "worse" in the gabriel sense) 
and therefore much easier to learn.

Forcing tail-call transformations and call/cc is for sure an advanced topic,
to 
horrify typical students. But I teach only basics to non-techies, architects,
artists.

Even recursion is an advanced topic, and thanksfully nobody is forced to write 
recursive in lisp/scheme. (though it helps to simplify bigger problems of
course)

> Jacob J. A. Koot writes:
>  > After about 25 years of programming in all sorts of languages (Lisp
>  > included) I saw Scheme and felt I could eventually begin to learn
>  > programming. This is 10 years ago. (Yes Matthias F, you did help)
>  > If we want our students to appreciate our education, we must first make them
>  > ask the right questions, I think. Answering a question before it is asked is
>  > sermoning like a prophet in the desert. Why do we need first class
>  > procedures and continuations? It's difficult to explain to someone who has
>  > never felt the need of them, be it to make things easier or to make things
>  > more beautiful. May be knowing some of the pitfalls of things like unix,
>  > ms/dos, C and C++ gives a programmer a feeling of being important, almost a
>  > magician. To them Scheme may look too simple to be of interest. If they only
>  > knew the complexity and abstraction of exploiting all of the capabilities of
>  > a language like Scheme. Scheme is so simple that is puts you right at the
>  > core of programming, but that's a boundary many programmers never cross.
-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/autocad/news/faq/autolisp.html