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RE: peasant revolt against DrScheme!



> 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.  The
> perception seems to be that scheme is only of interest to 
> academic computer
> scientists and is not a useful tool for real-world 
> programming.  Since most
> of the students (62%) were not CS majors, their interest was 
> in learning
> something they could use in the Real World.  Interestingly, 
> many of these
> non-CS types plan to make a career in programming.

To the students, it must seem they've got a legitimate beef. 
If you consider that most of them will not go on to graduate school.
To the student, with the present state of affairs, it no doubt
appears that they will not have much opportunity to use Scheme for
their future programming tasks in industry.

I can only support this anecdotally:
1. I recieved bad marks on my last review because I had planned to write
the UI for my test tool using MrEd.
My manager objected that it was too difficult to maintain code written in
a "non standard language". (I'm still pissed.)

2. Scheme is *not* a resume item. HR departments sort resumes based on
certain key
words like: VB, C/C++, Java, XML et al. The typical interview loop at
a software company (I've been through several and have given several)
usually involves answering one or more stupid logic puzzles, as
well as writing some routine in C/C++.

I quote Matthais:
"Programming languages change faster than some students' t-shirts."

This is *not* a rhetorical question:
How do you tell someone that most programming languages are fads, but
that Scheme isn't?

The reason I put this forward as a real question, is because I'm frequently
in the position where I am promoting or defending Scheme and this *comes
up.*