Instead of deciding between Python or Lisp for a programming intro course...What about an intro course that uses *BOTH*? Good idea?

[Rustom Mody]

On Wednesday, May 13, 2015 at 9:17:48 AM UTC+5:30, Ian wrote:
> On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 9:11 PM, zipher  wrote:
> > I know.  That's because most people have fallen off the path (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OneTruePath).
> 
> You wrote that, didn't you? I recognize that combination of delusional
> narcissism and curious obsession with Turing machines.

Interestingly saw this (CACM) the other day:

http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/CACMActuallyTuringDidNotInventTheComputer.pdf

non-delusional and in the opposite direction:

Turing's is a paper on mathematical logic. It describes a
thought experiment, like Schrödinger's famous 1935 description of
a trapped cat shifting between life and death in response to the
behavior of a single atom. Schrödinger was not trying to advance
the state of the art of feline euthanasia. Neither was Turing
proposing the construction of a new kind of calculating machine.
As the title of his paper suggested, Turing designed his
ingenious imaginary machines to address a question about the
fundamental limits of mathematical proof. They were structured
for simplicity, and had little in common 
with the approaches taken by people 
designing actual machines. 

Von Neumann's report said nothing explicitly about mathematical
logic. It described the architecture of an actual planned
computer and the technologies by which it could be realized, and
was written to guide the team that had already won a contract to
develop the EDVAC. Von Neumann does abstract away from details of
the hardware, both to focus instead on what we would now call
"architecture" and because the computer projects under way at the
Moore School were still classified in 1945. His letters from that
period are full of discussion of engineering details, such as
sketches of particular vacuum tube models and their performance
characteristic