On Feb 21, Guillermo J. Rozas wrote:
> >
> > 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?
>
> No, just consistent.
>
> And at any rate, the argument about case sensitivity has two parts:
> - Why do I prefer or not case insensitivity? That doesn't matter
> much.
> - The great inconvenience and lack of respect for existing users
> which the change causes/caused. Even though I much prefer case
> insensitivity, I would not argue for C to change. It would be too
> disruptive.
> Why are Scheme users afforded any less consideration?
Another anecdotal evidence: IIRC, the effect of switching to a
case-sensitive default on the (pretty large) PLT codebase was
ridiculously small if any. (I'm being careful here, I don't remember
any changes that were needed.)
> >>> 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.
>
> If they are already learning English, the hurdle is there, in English.
> Scheme is just being consistent with it.
As you said elsewhere: "[scheme keywords] were meaningless sequences
of characters" -- now consider this in a language where capitalization
is completely missing, not even different glyphs or different rules,
the whole concept is not there. Surely if you know a keyword as a
meaningless sequence fo characters it will be more complicated if each
character in that sequence could be replaced by some other meaningless
character (and often by a character that doesn't look the same)?
> >> 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".
>
> When it comes to programming languages, yes. Until Chinese-based or
> Hindi-based programming languages take off, that is a matter of
> fact, whether we like it or not. French Fortran is a curiosity,
> but, to my knowledge it has largely been abandoned.
Earlier today, when I replied to Brian I was suspecting that he did
ask a naive question (and I believe that my reponse was exaggerated).
But *this* is taking it ten steps further, and in a very self-assuring
way. The young students in these countries -- the ones who are
learning how to program, are also likely to be the ones who don't know
English well. So when I re-used your reply above:
The more you pile on, the higher the hurdle. Are you advocating for
making things more difficult intentionally?
what would be your true answer? Maybe something like "If your
students were speaking a real language, then the hurdle wouldn't be
higher."? How about "Just teach your kids to speak American like the
rest of us."?
> >>> * 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".)
>
> They spent infinitely more time designing _these_ languages than I
> did, as I spent 0 time doing it, and I imagine that they spent >0
> time doing it.
>
> That doesn't mean that they were not confused.
Let me translate to the random pedestrian who suffered all the way to
this point: "Four people spent a number of years thinking how to make
a language that is easy to teach; I spent absolutely no time doing the
same; and yet I can conclude based on my 0-year effort that the 4*N
year design that they came up with is misguided".
(How do you say that in your language -- "puhleeze"?)
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://www.barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
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