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Re: Functional Paradigm popularity and Maths (Was: XML as a transition to s-expr)



On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 08:35:17AM -0500, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> 1. The REPL matters. That's why Python can try to do the same thing. The
>    immediate feedback that students get from evaluating small expressions
>    etc. is the hook. 

I'm not sure that is the hook. The major trouble I had with learning
Scheme was that even when I had written some outstandingly beautiful
forms to do recursive factorials, solve the towers of Hanoi, and other
programs of obvious earth-shattering importance, and *even though* I
could get a very strong sense of the beauty and the correctness of the
language, it irked me that it took so long before I was solving real
problems about real files and real data.

It could just be the way I was learning, I suppose. But when I teach
Perl, I try and make sure that by the end of the first lesson, the
students have something that they can take away and make use of in
their daily computing.


-- 
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.  We
don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson