[plt-scheme] Re: you have a tough road ahead of you ; ; ; was Re: from hell to paradise

Grant Rettke wrote:

> This is for whom you are marketing "designing programs" and FP: people
> who don't want to put forth any effort, who don't want to learn how to
> think, and don't see the possibility that there is anything left for
> them to learn.

What you say doesn't surprise me, Grant, because of my experience in 
1978 failing to get career programmers in their thirties to use a while 
loop. (A *while* loop!) They were calcified. Which is why I spend time 
with seventeen-year-olds. Though half of them are calcified already. And 
I will show them five-line PLT Scheme programs to suck down the New York 
Times RSS feed and present it as an S-expression. But not too often. 
Because seeing stuff like that will not help them nearly as much as 
working through the "generate all permutations of this list" exercise, 
or doing abstract list function one-liners. Sure, you need to do a 
certain amount of selling. But at some point there needs to be steak 
underneath the sizzle. --PR