[plt-scheme] teachpacks vs. require

I guess what bothers me about teachpacks is that I don't want to forget about the ingredients necessary to make something work, or for my students to have any mystery about what's necessary. On a more practical level people are always re-installing things on our lab machines, and students often move their code between lab machines and their own machines, and they submit code that I will run on my own differently-configured machine, etc. With require the requirements are explicit in the code and not hidden in one machine's configuration state. I'm sure teachpacks have their value -- I doubt I'm a typical case either with respect to my teaching or my own programming -- but for what it's worth I do find them to be confusing and maybe even counterproductive.

 -Lee


On Jan 11, 2010, at 9:24 PM, Mark Engelberg wrote:

> Teachpacks tend to persist as students create new files, so you can
> "add once and then forget about it", as opposed to require, where
> you'd need to enter it in every file.

--
Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College
893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002-3359
lspector at hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
Phone: 413-559-5352, Fax: 413-559-5438

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