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From: S.Clayman@CS.UCL.AC.UK
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help,comp.emacs
Subject: First Language (Was Re: Emacs vs. Xedit)
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Date: 3 Jun 91 15:33:20 GMT
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Chris Petrilli writes:
>> 
>> I have always felt that Lisp (or more appropriately Scheme) should be
>> THE FIRST language ALL CS majors are taught, and extending it down to
>> high school would not be a terribly bad idea.  The idea of symbolic
>> computation is wonderful, and should be taught early on.  I curse the
>> people who tried to teach me BASIC, I guess I subverted their efforts
>> by writing in Assembler... :-)
>> 

I agree.  At UCL we used to teach Scheme but we now teach Miranda (a
fully lazy functional language) as the first language to all
undergraduates.  IMHO this has been more successful than teaching
Scheme, although the underlying reasons are the same.

For a comparison of Scheme vs Miranda have a look at:

%A P. Wadler
%T A critique of Ableson and Sussman -or- Why calculating is better then schemeing
%J SIGPLAN
%V 22
%N 3
%P 83-94
%D 1987

Stuart

PS This is for information. It is NOT to start a flame war.