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Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

Would How to Design Programs (http://www.htdp.org/) and Racket be a good combination to recommend for someone who is starting programming? Racket even has special language settings for different levels of HTDP that are the subsets of the scheme language that are used in each phase of the book.

And Racket is batteries included. It's got plenty of libs out of the box with lots of bells and whistles to make things that go bing. There's also GUI REPL tool called Dr. Racket.

I just checked racket out from Git, and it was easy to build and install (on an out-of-date Ubuntu) and they had binaries available too.

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I'd recommend Racket with SICP, actually (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html). While Racket is probably the best Scheme implementation around right now, the authors have a somewhat misguided (in my opinion) idea of what is important to teach first. SICP deals with more fundamental issues, and is much more worth your time. Although I should point out that I have only read a bit of HTDP, and looked at the table of contents.

SICP is excellent but I'm not sure if it should be the first touch you have to programming. HTDP might be a little more practical and easy to approach. Maybe for a computer scientist, SICP would be fine but for someone who wants to learn a little bit of coding, SICP is overkill.

Also, SICP's examples are intended for people with strong background in maths, etc (what you can expect from a CS student), like the examples on finding square roots or doing symbolic differentiation. Don't get me wrong, though. I personally like these examples a lot but I'm a pretty hard core CS geek.

I would like to give my enthusiastic vote to Racket as I am working through SICP exercises in Dr Racket. I find it very simple to use IDE. It just gets out of your way to perform simple REPL, has separate definitions and console panels. Its debugging feature is fairly intuitive. It also has more advanced features when one is ready for it.

It's a fine combination; as the settings hint, they were designed to be used together.

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