Re: mental models of the world

[Matthias Felleisen <address@hidden>]

  The Scheme worldview seem to be great for brilliant programmers to build 
  such systems; I certainly aspire to learning and understanding their "true
  lambda nature".

Your writing seems to indicate that you know a lot about Scheme from the
80s. Please take a look at 

 www.teach-scheme.org/

and 

 www.htdp.org/ 

The second link points to a complete book (MIT Press, thank you for
allowing us to place the book on the Web) whose first two chapters have
been used by over 100 high schools to teach programming. These high schools
range from inner city to expensive private, but the success is almost
uniform. Students get it, and students like it quite a bit. We also have a
bunch of middle schools trying it out.

Sorry to disappoint you, but Scheme is not just a well-defined language, we
have also shown that less than brilliant PhD students can learn it. 

-- Matthias