On Feb 21, Guillermo J. Rozas wrote:
> > No, I just don't see what users have to do with it. Most of them
> > still don't speak English anyway.
>
> Good luck learning Scheme or most other programming languages then.
Sure, you need some basic English level. But the more you pile on,
the higher the hurdle. Are you advocating for making things more
difficult intentionally?
> > Right. And when they learn how to be programmers, there's a bunch
> > of much harder stuff that they need to learn in addition.
>
> Sure, and the more you pile on, the higher the hurdle. Are you
> advocating for making things more difficult intentionally?
No, I'm advocating removing a hurdle.
> >> 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.
>
> Yes, because it is most like the largely case-insensitive natural
> language from which it grew, and which most people in the world are
> learning as well.
So now we're back to "most people in the world better know English or
else".
> >> 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.
>
> Were they learning English as well?
Yes, but they didn't use it frequently enough to internalize it.
> > * 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.)
>
> Sure. People can be confused.
With all due respect (as corny as that sounds), I think they spent a
little more time than you did on the question of designing these
languages. (And that's for a very large value of "little".)
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://www.barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
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