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

Ah! My error--- I feared a lowering of the bar, something I see all to
often these days; sorry to even indirectly tar you with that brush.

--hsm
p.s. turns out that I was the only Perl programmer who knew lisp well
enough to do the job. Knowing what I now know, I might well have
pushed for scheme instead.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 12:42 AM, Matthias Felleisen<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> Nobody's arguing for leaving them out of the curriculum.
> This is a conversation about the pedagogy of How to Design
> Programs, 15 years of experience teaching freshmen at elite
> and not so elite schools, and the _average_ students and the
> _average_ internship or coop that they get in the first summer
> or third semester. -- Matthias
>
> P.S. Congrats to landing a CL job in the real world.
>
>
> On Jul 8, 2009, at 2:34 AM, Hugh Myers wrote:
>
>> 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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>
>