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Re: long term plans?



On Jul 19, Jonathan Berry wrote:
> [...] my experience in writing Scheme-based educational applications
> indicates that teachers pressed for time won't install custom
> software applications, but they would probably be happy to go to a
> web page and type commands (that bring up graphics).

What's so bad about this (assuming that such people use Windows):

  1. Go to http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/PLT,
  2. Download the PLT EXE, Netscape: click install, IE: run.
  3. Accept defaults.

I think that this is not too hard, especially if you tell people to go
straight to
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/download/102/plt/plt.exe

One thing that could be done is some plt-quick.exe that wouldn't even
ask anything and just use the defaults - then you need to just run
it...

(Another thing is have some way to automatically check for updates
when it starts, which is not too hard to implement (I did something
like this)).


> Interpretation vs. compilation (speed) isn't as important as
> convenience.

We used to use a Dylan interpreter (Scheme syntax) written in Java, it
was terrible.  You'd definitely want to go for a serious
implementation as Kawa (if you insist on Java).

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
         http://www.cs.cornell.edu/eli/meaning.html        Maze is Life!