At 12:00 PM 10/10/2000 -0500, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
Kirby ..
The goals of TeachScheme and your goals are similar, not the same. We want to bring programming to mathematics and (here is the diff) "mathematics" to programming. (Watch the quotes before you flame. They mean something.) If you succeed, I am happy. It's an improvement over what we have in schools. Indeed, if you succeed, we don't need Scheme.
Under no circumstances would I want my success to mean "we don't need Scheme". That whole branch of the language family embodies a valuable a meme pool (lots of good ideas) and needs to keep evolving. As for bringing "mathematics" to programming, I assume you mean the uncompromising, logical core of Scheme. That's partly what makes the learning curve a bit steep, at least initially (I've seen some of your excellent teaching materials, accessible to kids, but inevitably some will want to skip over cons, car and cdr before diving in). Likewise, some teachers will inevitably be scared off by prefix notation and the heavy use of recursion, or, if not scared, will simply choose not to go there initially. Python may be presented in such a way as to keep those doors open. It can serve as a stepping stone to Java, certainly, but also to LISP, Scheme or even Haskell (and of course it's also an end in itself, not just a way station, like any mature-enough language).
You also write:
and that's knowledge you can intelligently build on, not dismiss as irrelevant or (worse) incapacitating.
I don't know what this means. I didn't dismiss Python and your idea of teaching in middle schools. We have done it and I wrote a note on our experience.
This was more in in response Shririam's feedback, after that positive review of my curriculum writing at the O'Reilly website:[1] Gee, great. I can never tell how to appropriately applaud your work. In the process of your extremely laudable efforts at educating people about math, you'll end up miseducating people about computer science. But I guess you don't really care about that...
I believe that TeachScheme is a better vehicle but I wish you luck.
-- Matthias
It's not really an either/or proposition in my book. In any case, I'm interested in designing for interoperability. Kirby [1] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/python/2000/10/04/pythonnews.html