Hi.
I did the start of my Math&CS degree at tau, and I remember the "extended
intro to CS with scheme" quite well.
I actually liked this course. Back then I was a hardcore c++ man, and I
really liked the way this course forced me to "think recursively". It was
also the first time I really worked with an interpreted language, and I
liked that it had an interactive prompt :)
I had with me many people who never programmed (or ran a compiler) ever
before.
The course itself was quite easy for me, as I was already programming for a
while then.

My feelings: having it in lisp is OK, having it in Python will probably be
OK as well, although I still think that it's a good idea to teach LISP to CS
students. (As a side note, I plan to start studying haskell sometime in the
near future)

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 11:27 PM, Rani Hod <[email protected]> wrote:

> As I see it, the only two real life uses for lisp are:
> 1) customizing your emacs
> 2) Abuse <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_%28video_game%29>
>

I think Paul Graham will disagree with you. But this is a foolish argument
to have here :)


> It is the very first hands-on course that CS students take, often 1st year,
> 1st semester.
> It is not a course about data structures, complexity, algorithms, software
> design, or even software development.
> They'll see some of it throughout the degree (and they still won't be great
> programmers without practice) but the focus of our course is elsewhere.
>

I agree. For someone who has never programmed before, teaching him about
open source/etc. is still irrelevant. He needs to stew a little. I don't
think this course is the place to put these things. And for people who come
to this course when they already know how to program (well): they don't
listen during the lessons that much anyway ;)

my %.2f currency.

As for being available to teach: I'd be interested in getting involved, but
I'm not sure I have the time for that right now. If this thing actually
happens, I might join.

Cheers,
Imri


-- 
Imri Goldberg
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http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/
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