Friday, February 8, 2008

Avinash doing PL!

I had some problems with imperative languages and the integer rounding off, resulting in failure to generate Cipher text using RSA. Talked to Avinash abt it, he told me about Scheme.
Went to the first Scheme Lecture today... it was wickedly cool.. even started reading the prescribed textbook (...which is surprising...) and came across the wonderful words below;

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
-- Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming.


Cracked up with Avi's joke which goes:
Computers are rational... unlike women!!!

Anyways Scheme... here I come!!!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for coming to my first lecture on Scheme, Gavin :-)

Scheme is a pretty cool programming language. I always thought that students should have fun learning something complex (and programming is complex). When students tell me they dislike programming, I tell them that, in fact, they dislike C++ (which is perfectly natural because it is so tough to learn).

One day, I was speaking to one colleague and I told him that we should use Scheme to introduce programming to our students (like at MIT and Berkeley). He told me that this couldn't possibly happen here because our students were not good enough!!!

He didn't realize that the reason Scheme is used at MIT and Berkeley is because people there want their students to become really good in programming... and therefore they use a simple language.