Books on FP, lambda calculus, closures - Re: teaching programming to kids

Liam, I hope it does, but if not there are more ways to explain this stuff. Thanks to everyone who has said kind words about this little text. I would like to stress something that I said the first time. Lambda expressions, closures, continuations (another interesting idea, but let's not go there now) and macros are nice features that make Scheme a kind of language construction set. None of this is interesting to the novice programmer. Where it starts to become interesting is when you have covered "normal" programming in Scheme and are interested in digging deeper. Then you first find that some things you have been using are actually built out of this stuff and you can create your own variations. Later you can use this to add stuff to understand it. For example: Ada has an interesting concurrency model while Occam and Erlang have different ones. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to see all three side by side in the same language? Using Scheme's building blocks, you can! It is great in physics that we can understand thousands of different materials in terms of combinations of a few hundred kinds of atoms, then understand all these atoms in terms of combinations of electrons, protons and neutrons and later unify them all in terms of combinations of quarks. But it is best to learn them in this order, even though in theory the quarks are the simplest. Anyone who gets really excited about finally "getting" the building blocks of Scheme and want to rush out and point them out to those who are starting out is making a big mistake. -- Jecel