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What was the students' response? Did they have a background in programming?

• trop 7y ago
  The students didn't have any coding background. Which, in a way, was good -- they didn't know how absurd this was to start programming with Lisp, use ASCII art as a visual vocabulary, and use Emacs and its REPL as an IDE. I wanted the students to gain confidence in this weird situation by working off of clear examples. Hence I made these extensive online notes. The students were generally great at typing in these examples and getting them to run, and some were creative with rearranging them, copying in extra code, and changing variables/strings to produce interesting effects. I didn't see "coding" in the sense of having a vision/plan, finding/inventing an algorithm to realize it, and then refining the result. But I saw "hacking" in the classic sense: gaining facility with an unlikely tool, and working through variations until something intriguing occurred. Given that it was an art class, I was actually pretty happy with this. This felt in line with what allows for a lot of good art school work: students starting out with a technique and working/reworking until it results in something satisfying or maybe even resonant. I liked how it broke the paradigm of "useful" coding. The Emacs environment became simply something fundamental and even somewhat neutral to work at.