Programming language “paradigms” are a moribund and tedious legacy of a bygone age. Modern language designers pay them no respect, so why do our courses slavishly adhere to them? This paper argues that we should abandon this method of teaching languages, offers an alternative, reconciles an important split in programming language education, and describes a [...]
When I was first learning about Functional Programming and Scheme, the idea that order-of-execution didn’t matter in purely functional programs, was “strange to me”, to put it nicely. When I first read about Scheme’s begin form, for example, I remember feeling satisfied that Scheme wasn’t totally insane as it had at least some way [...]
‘LAMBDA: The Ultimate GOTO’ (found here) is a paper that was written in 1977 by Guy Steele. It is fun to read, informative, and accessible to a wide-variety of programmers and interest levels. Here are some interesting bits about the paper (I will leave the detail to the paper, no sense in trying to re-state [...]
‘LAMBDA: The Ultimate Imperative’ (found here) is a paper that was written in 1976 by Guy Steele and Gerry Sussman. It is fun to read, informative, and accessible to a wide-variety of programmers and interest levels. Here are some interesting bits about the paper (I will leave the detail to the paper, no sense in [...]
The Lambda Papers are a series of seminal works on programming language design and implementation written by Guy Steele and Gerry Sussman.
You may have heard about them because of the very popular Lambda the Ultimate website, or maybe you just heard about them because you are studying Scheme, or are a student of programming history. [...]
In the comp.lang.lisp post [Slow Loop (alternatives in lisp?)] Francogrex asked how to implement pivot table functionality without it taking forever using inner loops. Folks posted clearly faster solutions along with good advice. By the way, taking forever means 12 hours for inputs of 1 million data points.
I wondered how you might lead someone down [...]
The First Year? It’s not Scheme.
Matthias Felleisen talks here about his teams approach to first-year courses on programming and computing.
Here is a presentation on the approach. Be sure to read it as there are a lot of interesting bits in there.
(via PLT)
Mike expounds on it here. It is a good article.
Mike’s blog is located here.
Ben blogged here about some stories about OLPC case studies. They are all worth checking out.
Listen to the following NPR articles (both found here):
Laptops for Kids in Small Towns May Not Be Panacea
Laptops Help Keep Migrant Workers’ Kids in School
And read this article One Laptop Per New York City Student a Success and report.
The company [...]
Analogies are often used to introduce folks to new ideas, introducing them not directly, but through comparison and inference. This seems to work well in all areas, including technical. The risk in using them in technical matters, though, is that person will never move past the analogy and into the realm of accurately understanding the [...]