[racket-dev] actionable items, was: comments on "comments on learning Racket"

> You could have different distributions also, with the appropriate default. Tell students to get the "picturing programs" drracket or the "Pyret" drracket, etc etc.

This seems like the way to go. There won't be one optimal solution for
Racket's wide spectrum of users.

There wouldn't even need to be different distributions, just different
installers right? Could an installer set the default language in the
prefs file?




> Students who have a hard time finding "choose a language" will also have decision confusion if given a big dialog of "find your class's preference in the haystack."
> -Ian
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sam Tobin-Hochstadt" <samth at cs.indiana.edu>
> To: "Matthias Felleisen" <matthias at ccs.neu.edu>
> Cc: "dev at racket-lang.org Dev" <dev at racket-lang.org>
> Sent: Monday, April 28, 2014 10:40:37 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: [racket-dev] actionable items, was: comments on "comments on learning Racket"
>
> On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Matthias Felleisen
> <matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>>
>>  when drracket starts w/o a preference file, we pop up a radio menu:
>>
>>  o Are you a student learning to program?
>>  o Are you an experienced programmer learning to use Racket?
>>
>>  Depending on which bullet the person checks, drracket starts in
>>  BSL [#lang htdp/bsl, one day soon] or #lang racket.
>
> Another problem with this approach is that BSL is not the right choice
> for many people in the first category.  They might be starting using
> DMDA, or Picturing Programs, or working on their own with SICP. In all
> of these cases, the language dialog needs to appear.
>
> Sam
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