[Tutor] Language truce

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

At 5:49 PM -0400 6/29/01, Tim Peters wrote:
>[alan.gauld@bt.com]
>  > Ho hum, sorry if I've offended anyone. And BTW the book is
>>  actually very good at what it does do. And many Pythonistas
>>  would find it interesting reading.
>
>All true.  Hard going for a beginner, though!  SICP is really about
>"Computer Science" more than *programming*.

Ah, this reminds me of a particular grad school hell (I'm now in the 
12th, of 12, of these, woohoo!) -- the obligatory Programming 
Languages class.

Nothing quite like taking someone who's coded pretty much the same 
style for 20 years and saying, "here, try THIS paradigm on your brain 
for a week!" "No, wait, THIS one!"

I remember being the only student to get partial credit for an ML 
problem in which the prof wanted a solution that required only two 
parameters be passed. I did it in an entirely different way, but 
couldn't figure out how to get it down from three to two. No one else 
did either, not even the functional programming fans.

The only class that hurt worse (in terms of brain frying) was 
probably Modeling and Simulation. I did all my code for that class in 
Python -- much to the chagrin of my professor.
-- 
_Deirdre    Stash-o-Matic: http://weirdre.com    http://deirdre.net
"Cannot run out of time.... Is infinite time. You... are finite....
Zathrus... is finite. This... is wrong tool!" -- Zathrus