Re: peasant revolt against DrScheme!

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk <karczma@info.unicaen.fr>]

Greg Pettyjohn wrote:
> 
> Oh yeah, I didn't mention that perhaps first semester students might
> soon be able to render fractal terrain using Scheme.
> 
> :-)


I don't understand your smiley.
We do it for some years already. Not the first semester, somebody
has to teach them the recursion, conditionals, and all that sad
stuff, but then there are some optional courses, I have a course
disguised under the name "Informatics for mathematicians" (Nobody
knows who invented this succulent name, I have nothing to do with
that), where I do computer graphics. All kind of fractals, recursive
generation of Brownian bridges as well. And Perlin noise. And
parametric surfaces in 3D. We don't care too much about speed, though.

Anyway, 
We have read here about bad introductory courses, about macho
attitudes, etc. I have seen a few things like that myself. The
lecture on functional programming for math students here (Caen
university) which used Lisp/Scheme has been abolished (I managed
to teach ML for the last year...) and replaced by guess-what 
(sqrt(E/m)).

Here, and in some other places we hear a constant complaint
NOBODY USES SCHEME. NOBODY USES IT. IT IS USELESS. 

Lorenz Graf from the student perspective says the same.

When on Usenet (games development group, polluted by freshmen
who have no idea on algorithms nor languages, they "just want
to make nice games") I sent a few algorithms written functionally,
I was insulted: "what kind of rubbish is that? Nobody writes
games in such a way".

==

That's why I *use* Scheme while teaching other stuff. I preach
among my colleagues this ideology, but we are shooting our
own feet producing mainly introductory courses. I would see
the problem reversed.
Write books on compilation using Scheme. Image synthesis in
Scheme. Signal processing in Scheme.
Visual interfaces (I know that Matthias doesn't like them...),
just to show how comfortable is the integration of an
event-processing package in Scheme.
Simulation.
NUMERICAL ALGORITHMS! Database managers, spreadsheets. XML
translators. We could continue forever. Please, popularize
GIMP/ScriptFu among your students.

DrScheme is distributed with some cute examples. I enjoyed
them very much, although I miserably failed to learn mixins
from them...

Now it is the time for All Good Men (and all King's horses...)
to add to it some libraries of reusable classes/components.

Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France