[plt-scheme] Re: [plt-edu] Leads on Liberal Arts Education and Programming

You forgot DNA synthesis.

And do tell kids to read at least GEB, Hofstadter.

-- Matthias



On Apr 10, 2008, at 9:33 PM, Marco Morazan wrote:
> Aha! But I can not ask people to go read Godel.
>
> I need something, besides my own words, that point to the idea that
> writing a Scheme program, formatting a text document, and writing
> music are all programming exercises:
>
> -- Scheme programs are data interpreted by something called an
> interpreter or are programs that tell interpreter what to do
>
> -- writing a musical score is recording data (musical notes in
> sequence) or a program that tells an musical interpreter what to do
> (whether a it is a synthesizer or a musician)
>
> -- one enters characters and figures in a Word processor or a program
> that tells an text-formatting interpreter what to do
>
> It is a broader definition than the classical view that programming
> requires a computer programming language. Some people at SHU are
> intrigued by this, but I am short on references. :-( I am not about to
> show them that lists can be implemented as functions or as a data
> structure. I would just loose them.
>
> Marco
>
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Shriram Krishnamurthi  
> <sk at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
>> Matthias and I pushed for that vision.  I don't think either of us  
>> for
>> a moment believed it had anything to do with programs being data.
>>
>> By the way, programs are data in virtually all languages.  E.g.,
>>
>>  "void main () {return 0;}"
>>
>> is a perfectly valid string in C.  At a less mundane level, this is
>> the heart of Godel's insight.
>>
>> Shriram
>>
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