Comment by agumonkey
12 days ago
Does it beat OO Java classes with students crying ? or months spent on warning kids not to mutate an iterator or else you're gonna cry again ?
Mostly kidding but different paradigms bear different pain points it seems.
Oh and lastly, the let-us-care-not-about-syntax is also an argument at Brown edu (krishnamurti and his team IIRC)
That said, I'd be curious to hear what your students had to say about scheme confusing traits.
I taught both SICP and Java, and I can confirm Java was far more confusing to students. Classes vs instances, inheritance, polymorphism. Why was everything a class? Don't I just want the computer to do something to some input?
And the public static void main and then endless conversations about packages, and public/private fields, that will backfire very pragmatically (at the time) unit test frameworks didn't have a way to call private methods ... Ironically by the time you're done with the basics, nobody has stamina anymore to learn anonymous inner classes.
The thing is, somehow syntax and some forms of abstractions cast a magic spell on most of the population (at time myself included) .. it's your mental interface to the semantics, so you want more syntax to be able to have more abilities, but syntax composes badly.
At least to me that's why I enjoyed lisps / lambda calc, it reduces the domain into a more homogeneous space, suddenly more things are possible with less. Although it seems that the mainstream rather enjoys doing simple thing with verbose tools (it does looks like you're doing a lot of work with a lot of advanced terminology) than solving hard problems with APL oneliners (hyperbole).
Different psychologies ?
I don’t think OO should be taught to students who aren’t already familiar with structs and passing functions around.
If those two things are already well-understood, the nature of OO as a some syntactical sugar and a couple lookup tables is readily apparent.
Without that background, the terminology seems weird and arbitrary and the behavior magical.