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Thanks for sharing your perspective and advice. What do you think of Pyret (http://www.pyret.org/ http://www.pyret.org/) and the accompanying textbook (http://p

Thanks for sharing your perspective and advice. What do you think of Pyret (http://www.pyret.org/ http://www.pyret.org/) and the accompanying textbook (http://papl.cs.brown.edu/2015/ http://papl.cs.brown.edu/2015/)? That should meet your criterion of a canonical book to work through. And that book is written by one of the authors of HTDP. But Pyret has a more conventional syntax and runs in the browser.

ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
Ashamed to admit I don't have any familiarity with it! I can vouch for other content of Shriram's that I came across, most notably some of his labs for his CS class at Brown -- they are absolutely awesome. So, I've got a feeling this is a prob. also an excellent book. EDIT: I forgot to add this: I mentioned that the syntax is challenging to kids at first BECAUSE there are so few rules, there is quite a bit they have to keep in their head as they write even very simple programs. You have to very quickly internalize the idea of function composition or else you are stuck, and that may be challenging for a young child at the beginning. But, at the same time, I think this is also a huge STRENGTH of the syntax. If he/she isn't getting this, it is pretty obvious and you simply cannot go anywhere until this happens, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. And, once they grasp this concept, then it is actually extremely easy because there aren't really any other syntactical rules to memorize and keep in order! This did require a lot of focus of kids, but I think there was something reassuring in the fact that they felt confident they understood all of the necessary principles of how the language was working, and that if they experienced issues, it was either in their own logic or in chasing some rogue parens. YMMV