RE: peasant revolt against DrScheme!

[Brent Fulgham <brent.fulgham@xpsystems.com>]

Mike,

> I thought some of the readers of this list might be interested in this
> story, which appeared in the Caltech student newspaper today. 
> It shows how far we still have to go to win the Hearts and Minds (TM)
> of potential programmers.
> 
[ ... ]
> A poll was taken of students in CS1 who had been through the DrScheme
> syllabus.  Fully 78.2% of them said that they wished that C had been
> taught instead, while only 3.5% were happy with the choice of DrScheme.

Does this happen every year?  I seem to remember something like this
happening last year, too.  (Or were they upset at having to read SICP?)

At any rate, most readers of this list are probably already converts,
but for my part I have to say I really do wish I had been exposed to
Scheme much earlier on.  I started with FORTRAN, which is still considered
critical to the "classic" engineering disciplines for some reason.  I
then moved on to C, C++, Java, and a raft of other procedural programming
languages.

It wasn't until the GIMP that I realized Scheme (er, Guile) could be
useful for anything at all.

Now that I have some small familiarity with the language, I am constantly
finding myself wishing that I could use various Scheme constructs in
my daily C++ programming work.  For example, I find myself muttering
that "this should just be a closure", or "I should just be able to
pass this function as a parameter" (well, I can but that requires coding
of function-pointer passing, etc.), or "I wish I could abstract the common
behavior of these three routines into a curried function that takes a
procedure argument .... etc."

I think we should do everything we can to support the "Teach Scheme"
project, and the various Scheme tools out there.  The GIMP convinced me
to start playing with it.  Maybe the AOLserver port, or some other small
project will bring still others into the fold...

Does anyone else have ideas on good niches where Scheme is a good fit?

-Brent