[plt-scheme] Scheme projects in my undergrad CS course

From: Shriram Krishnamurthi (sk at cs.brown.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 13 00:48:25 EST 2008

Hi Fred,

This is terrific.  I hope your department appreciates it as much as
all of us do!  Can't wait to see what's coming in the future.

Any chance you can get some of them to keep at it and eventually turn
these into PLaneT contributions?

> When he got the raw packet back from the robot, he grabbed the
> lambda function, applied it to the packet, and voila, the actual
> sensor reading was produced.

I think of this as completely normal, but I've come to find that year
after year, pretty sharp students find this a novel and profound
structuring tool.  So, it's great to hear your student(s) had the same
epiphany.

Three comments/questions:

- This is an impressive list of projects, but how much evaluation was
there of how well they did what they promised?

- How good is their code?  What's the measure of goodness?  Did they
get administered code-walks?

- Some of these remarks look a bit odd and unchallenged.  Eg, the
Scheme-in-C-Game-Engine guy says,

  In my opinion, using Scheme (or at least MzScheme) as a game
  scripting language has some key disadvantages to more conventional
  choices (such as LUA). The first of which is the
  much-less-than-trivial embedding process. Of course, LUA was
  specifically constructed with integration with languages such as C
  in mind. Another disadvantage is the complex organization and
  parenthetical syntax.

The first few remarks are perfectly reasonable, as is the last one,
but what does "complex organization" mean?  He should either write
sufficiently clearly that a technically literate person can understand
and evaluate the remark, or elide it.  (That is, the reader need not
agree with all his statements, nor should he be uncritical; but he
should be decipherable!)

Shriram


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