[plt-scheme] Re: More pedagogic stuff

On Aug 11, 2008, at 09:11, Matthias Felleisen wrote:

> 1. Don't confuse elite research universities with institutions that  
> use "University" in their name only because someone decided everyone  
> should get a degree from a college/university. My hunch is that to  
> this day, 90% of these places claim to teach OO early and first.  
> (Reality: At least they use an OO language to teach Fortran.)

Yesterday at SIGGRAPH I was talking with educators from California.   
They bemoaned the fact the ubiquity of Java as a required language.   
We thought OO wasn't really the reason Java became so widespread.   
Rather, it was because it isn't as messy as C++, it's portable, and it  
has rich toolkits.

I haven't run into any Schemers out here yet :-( , but I'll wear my  
TeachScheme! 2000 T-shirt at the big reception tomorrow night in  
Dodger Stadium.  I have found some Smalltalk folks who love Seaside  
who think it blows away Ruby on Rails.  I know RoR, I need to look at  
Seaside, and I'm curious what a DrScheme-based webkit along those  
lines would look like.

There's a tension between "build it quickly" (RoR) and "build it  
well" (HtDP).  More people need to understand that HtDP is a much  
bigger win in the long run.  I wonder how we can illustrate the  
tradeoffs or the inflection point in a way anyone would understand  
(e.g., Ed Tufte's insights into visualization).

I went to the scientific visualization BOF yesterday, and some of the  
massively parellel computations and filters they need just screamed  
Scheme to me.

Has anyone ever run Scheme on a GPU?

> 2. Last week, I had a private exchange with a person close to core  
> PLT. The email basically said that during a consulting presentation  
> with a major industrial software producer, one of the attendees got  
> up and said "it is way to expensive to use object in (this) area of  
> business. We use records and functions." I wouldn't be surprised if  
> this is true and becomes more true so as companies that create  
> networked software discover the cost of moving back and forth  
> (serialize and unserialize).

Maybe Google should chime in and explain how MapReduce helps them  
minimize data traffic.

Geoff