[plt-scheme] A data point on 'match' in intro programming: +++!

From: Matthias Felleisen (matthias at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 8 02:24:29 EDT 2009

I would love to use match in introductory courses to get away from a  
lot of details. (I introduced match into Scheme 84 in 1984.) Doing so  
would be a great disfavor to our students. Very few of them will end  
up working with a language that supports match, once they are on  
their first co-op etc. If I prepare them with structures/predicates/ 
selectors etc, they have at least a chance to adapt some of what they  
learned in "210" to their work. If we had showed them match and even  
'deep' matches, it would just be one more large conflict between this  
silly, design-recipe FP stuff and their real world. -- Matthias



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