[plt-scheme] Scheme Programming Question (Making an error message)

On Oct 6, 2008, at 8:05 AM, Abdulaziz Ghuloum wrote:

> The person in question might have been a professor since before you  
> were an undergrad.

That describes me :-)

Aziz, age, in research education as well as majority, does not make  
things right. The Scheme community spent years destroying its capital  
when SICP was hot, not realizing that teaching freshmen wasn't about  
teaching a programming language, and that it never ever could have  
been about Scheme per se. When we teach freshmen, we must ensure that  
they (eventually) understand how it applies to other languages. So  
this particular question, if posed to freshmen, could be reformulated  
as I demonstrated later on the mailing list.

If it wasn't about freshmen, the instructor could have asked about  
the O(.) performance of one algorithm compared to another, the  
constant for the n, and then requested that students rewrite it.  
Indeed, one could have added "is this a Scheme-specific problem" as a  
final sentence/question.

-- Matthias