[Tutor] [Edu-sig] school physics/math courses

[kirby urner]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 9:06 AM, bob gailer <bgailer at gmail.com> wrote:

<< SNIP >>

>> I'm glad to see Iverson amongst Babbage and Whitehead.
>
> Turing Award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought.
>
>> In 1974 I was
>> introduced to his invention: APL. That transformed how I thought about
>> problems and expressed algorithms. I still wish for some way to bring some
>> of that magic into Python.
>
> See NumPy and SciPy, which used APL for some design ideas. If we can
> get some people together on this idea, we can add more APL to Python.
>
> Perl6 will have some of this, but that's a knotty business that I am
> staying out of.
>
> I'm working on getting a GPLed APL for the OLPC XO. Arthur Whitney is
> writing one. I was the founder of I-APL, Ltd, and Managing Editor of
> APL News for Springer-Verlag. I have the copyrights on Iverson's
> textbooks for Arithmetic, Algebra, and Calculus, and intend to put
> them out under Creative Commons licenses.
>
> I need to recruit more people--mathematicians, teachers, APLers, and
> others--to work on these projects.
>

I see Python as a lot like APL, in terms of small, action-packed
units, e.g. data structures, with highly orthogonal (combinatorially
rich) behaviors.

I've worked with Iverson on J, admire Roger Hui's math teaching in
that language.  APL was a first love thought, showed me that not every
language is like FORTRAN, praise Allah.

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/cp4e.html is mostly Python, but there's
some J there too.  In my model intro class, I envision Python and J as
a "dynamic duo" in that they give students a sense of the spectrum,
the broad range among computer languages -- not saying other dynamic
duos not up to the job, go for it etc.

Kirby