Re: peasant revolt against DrScheme!

[Matthias Felleisen <matthias@cs.rice.edu>]

Mike's experience is mine too. Sadly enough it was confirmed last night
when I did code walks in a sophomore/junior-level course on program design
(HtDP scaled to doing "real" things: CGI scripts, web servers, GUIs, XML,
COM). The students who stayed for an after-class discussion took the
introductory course from some one other than me but like Scheme because
they have taken 'programming languages' from me, worked with someone around
here (Kathi) who used Scheme, etc. 

I found out through informal discussions what Mike found out through a poll.
So I motivate the choice of Scheme every year. I tell them that I don't
actually teach Scheme. (We don't. We teach six or seven core forms and a
few library functions.) I show them in ExtraExtra lectures how to use the
design recipes from HtDP in Java. None of my current colleagues makes any
such efforts, and by g*d it shows. 

So, if you teach Scheme at that level, you must -- again and again --
motivate why you do it, show that it isn't about Scheme (at that level),
and pull in your colleagues to do the same. 

-- Matthias