[Edu-sig] Re: The right learning environment

[arthur.siegel@rsmi.com]

>Notepad, however, is a proprietary text editor on a
>non-open-source OS.

OS is not a *religious* thing with me.  In my case I was
more than happy to pay the $20 (at the time) shareware
fee for Textpad - a Windows based, closed source,
editor which was configurable enough for me - easy  to
add Python (and PyGeo for that matter) syntax highlighting,
easy to have the interpreter called with or without arguments

That being said - I am making some conscious effort
to do more on Linux and hope to be able to make it my
default working environment.  And that more out of principle
than convenience.

>DrScheme has rich on-line teaching resources.  The
>language itself is able to negotiate on-line protocols
>such as http, although the tutorials don't focus on
>this so much.  Given Scheme is as capable in principle
>of doing CGI type stuff and Python or Perl, it'd make
>sense to have more demos and examples of this in the
>Scheme syllabi (both on-line and book form), likewise
>XML parsing.  Many times, this is where students are
>focussed, on web server issues.

Not looking to knock DrScheme.  But my experience was
my experience.  And hopefully I am not doing any harm
by reporting my experience to Mathias.  I have never
experienced DrScheme in the context of a formal curriculum.
And since that is how it is intended to be used, Mathias should not
be shocked that perhaps it does not work quite as well
outside of that kind of setting.

>This is true of both Python and DrScheme -- any text
>editor will do, but some are more "program editors" than
>text editors (like Vi and Emacs) meaning they're syntax
>aware.

If that is true of DrScheme it is very, very hard to understand
it from inside it.  I understand (now) that it is true of the  Scheme
implementation underlying DrScheme - but DrScheme itself
did not get across to me that there was a way to run things
from outside of itself.

And I am hoping it never gets to the point where folks may run into the same
kind of confusion (because you are probably right - I was confused)
about IDLE - though I don't now see anything to indicate that things
are on a trajectory where that is a real concern.

Art