> (cons 'foo 'bar)
! error: bar is not a list
I later found out that this was apparently due to having been provided with a "teaching" version of the interpreter intended for beginning students (who presuably don't know any better), which makes it even worse.
I would definitely characterize my attitude toward Racket as "hate", and if acbart made the same mistake my (generally quite reasonable and competent) CS professor did, I wouldn't be surprised if their students felt likewise.
The example that you give is not an error in full Racket:
Welcome to DrRacket, version 6.12 [3m].
Language: racket, with debugging.
> (cons 'foo 'bar)
'(foo . bar)
* * *
I'm not an academic, but the community and core Racket team are incredibly supportive, and any Comp Sci professor running into difficulties teaching a Racket-based course can easily access plenty of support and guidance, starting by contacting the user mailing list.
I think you still misunderstand; racket doesn't have different interpreter/compiler versions with different language features, racket code explicitly can request different languages via a language directive (I think there is a corresponding UI option in the Dr. Racket UI.) Among the preinstalled options are a series of teaching languages designed to accompany the textbook How to Design Programs, among others.
Did these students have prior programming experience? Was their reaction due to a particular fault of Racket or would they have disliked any language to which they were not accustomed? Perhaps their reaction was to the idea of functional programming which would have provided a distressing challenge to intuitions developed through object-oriented or imperative programming? What textbook did you use?
It's not that languages like Racket, Rust, Haskell or even something like Prolog and other languages aren't interesting or useful, in many cases they're a better fit for your problems. It's just that without the background in the C-style and object oriented languages it's pretty hard to appreciate the more "niche" language and the problems they solve.
Between Go Rust, F#,Nim, Kotlin etc I think ML-style syntax, and composition over inheritance is generally being preferred in a lot of newer up and coming languages. As well languages like C#/Java/Rust are so multi-paradigm these days the crossover relevance is very high from any one language to another.
I've never seen most languages as drastically different really. Lisps and Prolog certainly are, Rust is a little with the borrow checker, but otherwise I feel like people make much ado about "int x" vs "x :int" and "f(thing)" vs "thing.f()"
I have seen developers complain they had to learn an unpractical "ivory tower" language like Haskell - and then the same developers get totally lost when C# introduced type inference and closures and deferred evaluation of queries.
How did you approach teaching it?
Source: took the class with him.
Your son's case aside.
But CS for a while has been sold as something that anybody can do, is generally the easiest place to be where you can make big money. Even accidental, brush with hardships can make people quit as of this point.
Also read: The perils of Java schools: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
I'd say this though - a "cult" following I would note as a likely symptom of a good curriculum, one that does such a good job that it inspires those that go through it to advocate for it strongly. Is that not itself evidence of some indirect sort? I'd say it's better than most out there.
In terms of its advantages, I think a reasonable person can decide if both the advantage is actually an advantage and at least gauge how a curriculum fares on executing on the advantage. For example, the ramping up of difficulty from the teaching languages. Instead of saying "theres little evidence", I would go through the curriculum and its advantages (and disadvantages) like that.