On Oct 11, 2012, at 11:04 AM, Greg Graham wrote: > I am the one full-time technology person at a small college prep school. My > background before taking this job five years ago was 22 years of commercial > software development and a bachelor computer science degree. I have been > interested in Lisp since I first heard about it in college, but have never > gone beyond dipping my toe in the water. > > This semester, I decided to teach a program design course based on How to > Design Programs 2e. So far, it is the best course I've taught, after trying > things in the past that I thought would be more fun and engaging (GameMaker, > Processing, and Greenfoot). Although HtDP may be less entertaining, I'm > seeing the students learn some important concepts and skills that will serve > them well the rest of their lives, and they are sufficiently engaged by the > mental challenge of the material.
Thanks. (As you can tell, 2e is more entertaining than 1e but I am a person who
thinks principles come first and I will never sacrifice them for
entertainment.)
> So, in order to teach this class, I am working ahead of the students in HtDP,
> as well as reading The Little Schemer, The Racket Guide, and this email list.
> I am enjoying the process of learning Racket.
Good reading list, especially this mailing list. There is also a plt-edu list.
See racket-lang.com.
> Well, in my job I wear many hats, and one thing I need to do is create a web
> app that reads the convoluted SQL Server database of our Student Information
> System and produces reports in the form of Excel spreadsheets. I was planning
> on doing this in C# ASP.NET MVC, but the project has been sitting on the back
> burner for a while. I know C#, but I'm having to learn ASP.NET MVC. One
> reason I chose C# was the existence of libraries to produce Excel documents.
>
> I am writing to this email list because it occurred to me that I could try
> writing the app in Racket, learning the language as I go. I don't think the
> existence of an Excel library is that important because it appears to be
> pretty easy to generate the kind of spreadsheet I need using Microsoft's
> SpreadsheetML XML schema. So, do you think this is a crazy idea or not?
It is a perfectly normal idea. Racket comes with a DB library, and I think you
will be able to extract the data from your SQL db. As for generating Excel
spreadsheets, I don't know how often you will need to do this. I had to take
this step in the spring (for personal reasons), and I decided to create a CSV
file instead, opened it in Excel, corrected the two or three mistakes I found,
and shipped it off. If I had to do this more than once, I'd correct the
mistakes programmatically and that's what I recommend you do. If you need to do
XML, there's a library for that too and a simple connection to S-expressions
(and a complicated one). In ISL, you'd write
(define (my-nth-web-page n)
(local ((define txt "My " (number->string n) "th Web Page")))
`(html (title ,txt)
(body ([bgcolor "pink"])
(p ,txt)
(p "really")))))
Indeed, this part of the project could be done in the student languages.
And if you need help, send email to this list. Welcome -- Matthias
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