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From: nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (Doug Alan)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Object oriented languages (MIT vs Hahvahd)
Message-ID: <2125@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 14-Jun-84 01:46:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.2125
Posted: Thu Jun 14 01:46:31 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 15-Jun-84 00:37:17 EDT
References: <1979@mit-eddie.UUCP> <268@harvard.UUCP> <2115@mit-eddie.UUCP> <2123@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 28

I guess I didn't make my point very clear in my previous message, but a
point I was trying to say is that a language like Scheme is a perfect
medium for teaching an introductory computer science course, because it
is so conducive to teaching incredible concepts.  It is a clean, simple,
powerful, and beautiful language (interpretive, no 2nd class objects,
procedures are 1st class, lexically scoped and complete with working
funvals, great for demonstrating message passing, computation streams,
data abstraction, control abstraction, delayed evaluation, recursion,
etc.)  -- much more so than assembly, C, Pascal, or any such language.
And unless you want to write production programs, you don't have to
worry about I/O, compilers, linkers, and all the other cruft that other
languages require that you understand before you can even use them.
Someone taking an introductory computer science course shouldn't have to
deal with all that cruft.

Harvard used MIT's course with Scheme and all its neat concepts for a
semester, but seems to have reverted back to its old course (which by
the way is based on MIT's course from about 10 years ago) due to lack of
computer resources and a desire to make the course more practical once
again.  And this I think is a shame.

-- 
				-Doug Alan
				 mit-eddie!nessus
				 Nessus@MIT-MC

				"What does 'I' mean"?