[Edu-sig] Re: Lisp vs Scheme vs Python

[Matthias Felleisen]

No recursion is not gratuitous with quicksort and fractals. It's necessary
there. Eliminating it means you manage your own stack, and I bet you're not 
as good at that as Guido. 

_Teaching_ recursion first, followed by abstraction (of which iterators are
just one simple part) is not inward looking. It is _empowering_ programmers
and _empowering_ people who wish to learn to think systematically. 

Of course I prefer 

 (map (lambda (x) (* x 2)) (build-list 10 identity))

over whatever goble-dee-gook the recursive defs look like. But I thought
this list was about teaching, empowering people with programming, and using
programming to empower people to think (the way stupid old math used to
do).

-- Matthias