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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

If I understand correctly, you're making scholarly CS Education arguments relative to PbD and HtDP, correct? Like, before you, the professors behind HtDP did relative to SICP (though they chose a playful academic article title, rather than a domain name :)? On that, I'll to defer to you CSE people, to investigate and debate, in the onward progress of science.

You're not, however, objecting to Racket itself, the practical programming language platform that enabled building the HtDP progessively-powerful teaching languages and their beginner IDE?

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I too am curious about the author's opinions of SICP. As a self taught developer, SICP and HTDP gave me the classic "My-Eyes-Are-Open-And-Now-Can-See" experience. I didn't feel like it was something to take with me to business directly, but an explanation of how data and functions relate through show-not-tell.

It's sort of saddening to me that the average CS student exposed to this stuff doesn't experience the sublime when S-expressions suddenly click, or whatever.

I love SICP, great ideas. Keep in mind I'm talking about your first real coding experience. You were a self-taught developer, right? Perhaps I'm over-inferring, but it sounds like you hit the curriculum right when you needed it. For about 80-90% of my students, that time wasn't right. The others, who were more like you, also probably got a lot of it.

As I said in another part of the thread, having it later in the curriculum makes sense. I'd love to subject everyone to a Programming Languages course. At Virginia Tech, they called it Comparative Languages. Here at UD, there used to be a Junior level SICP course. I wasn't around for it, but I think it was brilliant and well-timed. A lot of the problem came with trying to move those realizations earlier when folks aren't as ready for it - plus, all the other associated problems I raised.

I see what you're saying about placement in time of curriculum. You're right, and I came into HTDP and SICP after knowing 3-4 programming languages well enough to release production code in them, understood the differences between programming paradigms, and was coding full-time as a job. That's very different than a freshman with little or no knowledge of programming.

I've wondered what my reaction would have been if I had started with something like SICP or HTDP, and wondered if it would've saved me some headache. It's interesting that your real world experiences reflect that it might not have been as enlightening as I wondered.

Edit: "might NOT have been as enlightening..."

Thanks for the reply :)

You are correct! I considered whether I needed to make this distinction more clearly. I'm strictly talking about this approach (language and/or curriculum) being used in CS1. I actually have a lot of love for Racket itself - composing functions and passing selectors to higher order functions to make games and a Kitten Slideshow app still feels so cool even now.

As I brought up in the post, the domain was from a joking argument with my colleague. He started it when he bought ihatepython.com. The fact that he hasn't fleshed it out is a disappointment to us all :)

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