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Thursday, September 14, 2006 12:00 AM

Why Johnny can't code

BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.

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  • Wednesday, September 13, 2006 11:46 PM

    Scheme is a fine recommendation!

    Mitch, if you are puzzled why Brin is hunting down 1982 BASIC like he was coming to get his love, consider this first google of the Scheme language I pulled up:

    ***

    Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme.

    Scheme was one of the first programming languages to incorporate first class procedures as in the lambda calculus, thereby proving the usefulness of static scope rules and block structure in a dynamically typed language. Scheme was the first major dialect of Lisp to distinguish procedures from lambda expressions and symbols, to use a single lexical environment for all variables, and to evaluate the operator position of a procedure call in the same way as an operand position. By relying entirely on procedure calls to express iteration, Scheme emphasized the fact that tail-recursive procedure calls are essentially goto's that pass arguments. Scheme was the first widely used programming language to embrace first class escape procedures, from which all previously known sequential control structures can be synthesized. More recently, building upon the design of generic arithmetic in Common Lisp, Scheme introduced the concept of exact and inexact numbers. Scheme is also the first programming language to support hygienic macros, which permit the syntax of a block-structured language to be extended reliably.

    ***

    This is what is written on the doorstep of Scheme, at MIT.

    The writing above is unintelligible, Mitch. Leaving shit like this on the doorstep is tantamount to driving away acolytles with two by fours with nails in the ends. No wonder Brin is buying Commodores for his kid.

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