From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:tektronix!zehntel!sytek!menlo70!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!cca!ima!inmet!ramsey
Newsgroups: net.lang
Title: Re: Re: Bad Habits from Interps - (nf)
Article-I.D.: inmet.47
Posted: Mon Mar 21 03:24:22 1983
Received: Thu Mar 24 07:43:01 1983

#R:cbosgd:-326900:inmet:4700003:000:877
inmet!ramsey    Mar 19 18:52:00 1983

I just had to comment on this comment:
----------
I know some of you out there think LISP is wonderful.  I'm very happy
for you.  But I think you are in the minority.  And I don't think LISP
is a good teaching tool, primarily because it relies on recursion too
much.  Recursion is a VERY hard thing for a beginner to learn.  (This
same argument applies to LOGO as well.)
----------
I have taught short courses in LISP, BASIC and Pascal to beginners.
Beginners seem to have as much trouble dealing with loops as they do with
recursion.  Teaching recursion is only a problem when you are dealing with
someone who already knows how to program in a non-recursive language.  You
can always tell someone who learned to program in LISP (or LOGO) late in
life, their programs look like FORTRAN with lots of extra parentheses.

                                              Marc Ramsey