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Comment by nequo | Hacker News Reader

What makes it horrible? I never took a course in Racket or any other language. But the documentation and HTDP look very beginner-friendly.

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I just think functional based program is a bit harder to reason about for newbies. Programming did not click for me until the third class in the track where we learned object oriented design. Pretty common experience in the program as well, scared away a lot of people who took fundies 1 to explore the major or to minor in CS.

I took the class as a freshman, taught by Matthias, and then was a grader/lab helper the following year. (Oh gosh, this is all 15 years ago now)

In my observation, it was those with previous java/c++ experience that couldn't let that go who struggled the most. Total newbies were a blank slate and more likely to 'get it', assuming they have the abilities needed to succeed in a CS program.

I would say that was my experience as well. It actually took me a while to understand why I would use classes and objects.

Could just be different strokes for different folks. I thought OOD in java taught by Lerner was way better (Card game project opener was wonderful) and just made more intuitive sense. I didn't honestly get functional programming until circling back to Racket in PL.

I would also say Matthias is a legend and my instructors were nowhere near that level.

+1 as someone who took and TAed it for multiple years at UBC. The people who came in with preconceived ideas of CS were the ones that struggled the most.

We had a bypass exam, which was more or less the final for the course. If you passed it, you got the credit. I don’t think a single person passed it while I was there.

Matthias Felleisen co-wrote a book on Java, elegant uses of class-based inheritance, and elegant design patterns.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561150/a-little-java-a-few-p...

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