peasant revolt against DrScheme!

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu>]

Washington University in St Louis had -- probably still has -- a
similar plan, where they started out with Turing machines.

I saw no significant positive effect this had had on the graduates of
this program that I knew.  On the other hand, a program that teaches
Turing machines first probably has odd linguistic ideas anyway.

I have long been sympathetic to the idea of brutalizing first, so they 
will understand the beauty better later.  The problem is that this
totally destroys the students who aren't already CS geeks.  The CS
geeks may not understand the point to the sequence, but they're
already used to random notations with bizarre restrictions.  The
non-CS people will walk away shaking their heads.  And one day, they
will be the legislators we have to go ask for money. (-:

Anyway, all this Turing machine/assembly programming stuff is just
high-level claptrap.  Why pick such an abstract level as the starting
point?  Why not QM?  

(Okay, okay, I can hear the Caltech people already ...)

Shriram