5 ms·

You may be interested in checking this out for inspiration: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ (It's the

You may be interested in checking this out for inspiration: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ (It's the Intro to CS book used at my alma mater, teaching programming in Racket)

ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
Tried doing some of that with High School kids -- I have to admit, at the beginning it was very difficult for them to wrap their head around the basic concepts in functional programming. The other issue was that the few syntactical rules and prefix notation, while great in the long term, required the kids to do a bit more of mental gymnastics for even basic things at the beginning, so that didn't help either. But man after the initial hump, I was convinced that this is the route to go through in order to introduce someone to programming with very solid first principles.
- lisper 10y ago
  That's why I'm using a library (https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib) to smooth over some of Common Lisp's rough edges. The goal of the book, what I hope will make it unique, is to teach all of the basics without having to get too hung up on the details of CL. The reason chapter 3 is taking so long is that I can't figure out a good way to get around one of those details. I want chapter 3 to be about parsing i.e. I want the reader to build READ before they build EVAL. So I want to introduce READ-FROM-STRING, and one of the things I want to be able to read from strings is characters. Unfortunately, CL uses the same character (backslash) as the reader dispatch macro character for characters (e.g. #\x) as it does for the escape character in strings. So if you type #\x you get the character x, but if you type "#\x" you get a reader error because the backslash is consumed as an escape character inside the string. I have yet to find a satisfactory solution.
- rwallace 10y ago
  I have met people who were already earning a paycheck as professional C programmers, who didn't fully grasp what it meant to return a value from a function. If I were teaching beginners these days, I would do what SICP does and tackle the substitution model of evaluation head-on at an early stage.
deleted 10y ago
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ChicagoBoy11 10y ago

Tried doing some of that with High School kids -- I have to admit, at the beginning it was very difficult for them to wrap their head around the basic concepts in functional programming. The other issue was that the few syntactical rules and prefix notation, while great in the long term, required the kids to do a bit more of mental gymnastics for even basic things at the beginning, so that didn't help either. But man after the initial hump, I was convinced that this is the route to go through in order to introduce someone to programming with very solid first principles.

lisper 10y ago
That's why I'm using a library (https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib) to smooth over some of Common Lisp's rough edges. The goal of the book, what I hope will make it unique, is to teach all of the basics without having to get too hung up on the details of CL. The reason chapter 3 is taking so long is that I can't figure out a good way to get around one of those details. I want chapter 3 to be about parsing i.e. I want the reader to build READ before they build EVAL. So I want to introduce READ-FROM-STRING, and one of the things I want to be able to read from strings is characters. Unfortunately, CL uses the same character (backslash) as the reader dispatch macro character for characters (e.g. #\x) as it does for the escape character in strings. So if you type #\x you get the character x, but if you type "#\x" you get a reader error because the backslash is consumed as an escape character inside the string. I have yet to find a satisfactory solution.
rwallace 10y ago
I have met people who were already earning a paycheck as professional C programmers, who didn't fully grasp what it meant to return a value from a function. If I were teaching beginners these days, I would do what SICP does and tackle the substitution model of evaluation head-on at an early stage.

deleted 10y ago

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