On Feb 21, 2009, at 10:29 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote: > > 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.)
So? Good for you. >>>>> 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, but you've quoted me out of context. I was teaching it to people who did not know English at all (a few did). But case folding was not a problem for them, as they were used to it. You, on the other hand, agreed that they were learning English anyway, so the rule should not have been a surprise to them. >> 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."? It's not an issue of 'real' language vs. not. And not American, but English -- often foreigners speak it better (more grammatically) than native speakers. And yes, I believe in teaching them English from an early age, when they are more likely to learn it well. Now, I don't know what country you are talking about. But the ones that I'm used to start teaching English well before they start teaching programming. > >>>>> * 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"?) Marx and Engels spent many years thinking how to run the economy of a country. I spent absolutely no time (well, an infinitesimal amount) thinking how not to do it. Yet, I can conclude based on my 0-year effort that the multi-year design they came up with is misguided. People deeply in something can easily paint themselves into a corner. At any rate, you are using an argument based on 'authority', and I generally find those pretty weak. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
