Scheme as a virtual machine?

[toby]

On Nov 22, 10:57 am, Howard Brazee <how... at brazee.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Nov 2010 05:38:53 +0100, Ertugrul S ylemez <e... at ertes.de>
> wrote:
>
> >Haskell is a simple language with a comparably small specification.
> >It's not as simple as Common Lisp, but it's simple.  Note that simple
> >doesn't mean easy.  Haskell is certainly more difficult to learn than
> >other languages, which explains the low number of success stories.  On
> >the other hand, I'm doing rapid web development in it.
>
> I wonder how much that difficulty is innate, and how much is due to
> learning other languages first.

This is a good (if familiar) observation. Teaching children (or young
people with little exposure to computers) how to program in various
paradigms could produce interesting primary evidence. Pity that this
isn't examined widely and systematically. We could learn something
about how to teach programming and design languages this way, don't
you agree?

The OLPC might do some interesting things in this area but it is still
one set of tools. More interesting might be to compare outcomes across
a range of different tools, paradigms, syntaxes, and teaching
strategies.

> I'm an old time CoBOL programmer, and know of quite a few people who
> tried to learn OO-CoBOL without much luck.   The way to learn it was
> to forget it - learn OO with some other language, then come back to it
> later.    We had to divorce ourselves from the old paradigm first.    
>
> --
> "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found,
> than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace
> to the legislature, and not to the executive department."
>
> - James Madison