On Feb 21, Guillermo J. Rozas wrote:
> > But I did say "most". It's safe to assume that for every example of a
> > case insensitive piece of software I can find about 10 case sensitive
> > ones. Anecdotal evidence is therefore not going to be a good tool for
> > advocating case insensitivity.
>
> Most? You must have a very different measure of the rest of the
> world if you consider programmers vs. users of computers...
No, I just don't see what users have to do with it. Most of them
still don't speak English anyway.
> >> The universe of programmers is far smaller than the universe of
> >> computer users, and computer users (except for ordinary Unix
> >> ones, which tends to be a subset of the universe of programmers)
> >> would scream if they ever had to deal with case sensitivity.
> >
> > We're not talking about users, we're talking about programmers.
>
> But I would hope, and it was certainly a goal of Scheme early on, to
> make more users programmers.
Right. And when they learn how to be programmers, there's a bunch of
much harder stuff that they need to learn in addition.
> Some of us believe that in this day and age, being ignorant of
> programming, at least at some level, is akin to being ignorant of
> mathematics (again at some level) or science.
Did I say in any way that I'm against making the masses know how to
program? It's *you* who holds the opinion that a case-insensitive
language is somehow easier to learn.
> Thus making changes to a primarily teaching language that are
> extraneous to novice users (as opposed to experts from other
> programming languages) seem misguided at least.
If we're already down to anecdotes, I can provide two:
* As a kid if a non-English-speaking country, I have seen several
examples of students that were confused by case-insensitivity.
* When the HtDP authors wrote a series of languages aimed at teaching
students, they intentionally made these languages case-sensitive.
(This was well before their host language changed its default mode
to being sensitive.)
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://www.barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
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