3 ms·

Wait, don't all these "sort ofs" make it actually an ideal tool for teaching the basics? I mean, we're talking about basics, so what you're saying is that you c

Wait, don't all these "sort ofs" make it actually an ideal tool for teaching the basics? I mean, we're talking about basics, so what you're saying is that you can teach the basics of a number of different paradigms with one language.

garmaine 8y ago
It's very hard to teach the value of some approach if you can only see it implemented half-way.
craigsmansion 8y ago
> what you're saying is that you can teach the basics of a number of different paradigms with one language. I don't know about Python, but that is one of the delights of SICP and scheme in general. It's not that there isn't a OO implementation in scheme; it's that there are too many. Implementing an OO system is a medium-advanced exercise left to the reader. As a result there are many available, up to the point one wonders if "OO" can be rightfully coined "a paradigm". Constraint based/logic programming? I think it's a chapter in SICP, and covered by one of the SICP video lectures showing how to build a simple prolog-like language to illustrate some other concept Type systems? This one is a little funny. There's a SICP lecture on it (the recordings are from the 80s), and I thought it was an unfortunate choice of name, since "type systems" are a real and important concept now in modern computer languages and the naming would clash, but no, it actually was an implementation of a type system as we now use the term. I think one of the reasons scheme doesn't have "a lot of stuff" is because most stuff, if well understood, is trivial. If it doesn't seem trivial, one simply doesn't have a deep enough understanding of the concepts yet. One of the things about using scheme effectively as a teaching language is that it puts the wizardry in the actual wizard, not in the magic box with the blinkenlights.

3 ms·

Wait, don't all these "sort ofs" make it actually an ideal tool for teaching the basics? I mean, we're talking about basics, so what you're saying is that you c

by BerislavLopac 8y ago

garmaine 8y ago
It's very hard to teach the value of some approach if you can only see it implemented half-way.
craigsmansion 8y ago
> what you're saying is that you can teach the basics of a number of different paradigms with one language. I don't know about Python, but that is one of the delights of SICP and scheme in general. It's not that there isn't a OO implementation in scheme; it's that there are too many. Implementing an OO system is a medium-advanced exercise left to the reader. As a result there are many available, up to the point one wonders if "OO" can be rightfully coined "a paradigm". Constraint based/logic programming? I think it's a chapter in SICP, and covered by one of the SICP video lectures showing how to build a simple prolog-like language to illustrate some other concept Type systems? This one is a little funny. There's a SICP lecture on it (the recordings are from the 80s), and I thought it was an unfortunate choice of name, since "type systems" are a real and important concept now in modern computer languages and the naming would clash, but no, it actually was an implementation of a type system as we now use the term. I think one of the reasons scheme doesn't have "a lot of stuff" is because most stuff, if well understood, is trivial. If it doesn't seem trivial, one simply doesn't have a deep enough understanding of the concepts yet. One of the things about using scheme effectively as a teaching language is that it puts the wizardry in the actual wizard, not in the magic box with the blinkenlights.