[plt-scheme] A data point on 'match' in intro programming: +++!

Just to step in a moment; I'd point out that at this point I'm coding
in lisp (admittedly CL, not scheme) on a commercial project so I'm not
really clear on your notion about what they can use in the real world.
After learning where the library is, the second most important thing
students need to learn is how to 'think'. Match and 'deep' matches are
far more likely to provide think-fuel than leaving such gems out of
the curriculum.

--hsm

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 12:24 AM, Matthias Felleisen<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> I would love to use match in introductory courses to get away from a lot of
> details. (I introduced match into Scheme 84 in 1984.) Doing so would be a
> great disfavor to our students. Very few of them will end up working with a
> language that supports match, once they are on their first co-op etc. If I
> prepare them with structures/predicates/selectors etc, they have at least a
> chance to adapt some of what they learned in "210" to their work. If we had
> showed them match and even 'deep' matches, it would just be one more large
> conflict between this silly, design-recipe FP stuff and their real world. --
> Matthias
>
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