[plt-scheme] Re: HTDP - evidently not for everyone.

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Doug Williams <
m.douglas.williams at gmail.com> wrote:

> I generally stay out of the academic discussions, but this one reminds me a
> lot of the old discussions that would crop up about "The Programmer's Stone"
> white paper years ago. I wasn't able to find the original white paper in a
> quick search, but the (I assume original) author has a blog with what seems
> to be the same material repackaged and possibly/probably revised. It seems
> the history is at http://www.the-programmers-stone.com/about and 'the
> meat' seems to start at
> http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-1-thinking-about-thinking/-- I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the material.
>
> I guess my own view is that programming (e.g., methodologies, languages,
> tools, etc) has been defined by people who 'are good at it'. Unfortunately,
> we also tend to lack the introspective ability to know why we are 'good at
> it' or really even how we do it. Because of this, many people believe that
> it is an art -- with some kind of innate ability associated with it --
> rather than a science or engineering discipline based on processes that can
> be taught successfully. I applaud the efforts of those people who are tying
> to do the latter.


I am a bit unclear whether you are saying programming is an art/science, or
that you are saying that we can have a scientific method toward teaching
programming.  As the links you cited (mappers vs packers) sits in the camp
of programming being a heavily intellectual and creative activity that
aren't easily duplicated by coming up with and following more ever more
complex processes.

Cheers,
yc
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/attachments/20100210/59ad4b87/attachment.html>