3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
6:44 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
I want to teach them enough about what programming IS,
that THEY can
select what language they want to use.
Interestingly, the book "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs" by Abelson and Sussman is often cited as a book that
actually conveys precisely what programming IS, and even more
interestingly, how programs WORK. After writing a good number of
programs, you begin to write programs to manipulate programs (Chapter
4), and programs to transform and execute programs (Chapter 5).
And the book uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp of course. And I can't
think of a better choice for the task at hand. No syntactic baggage.
Exceptionally clean semantics, even to the starter.
The Scheme standard (dubbed "R5RS") is short enough to be read in an
afternoon. Around 50-80 pages. See here:
http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z-H-2.html#%_toc…
The book, SICP, is even free! See here:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html