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0 pointsmageofmath12y ago0 comments

At Brown (the place this research is coming from) one of the main CS intro courses is taught in Racket. It's worked really well and people enjoy the simplicity in getting programs running quickly. People with previous programming experience have more trouble than true beginners at that point in the course.

The course later moves into 3 other languages (OCaml, Scala, and Java) to try and get the beginners not focused on any particular language, though there is some debate on whether that effectively teaches the beginners any language particularly well.

Pyret would definitely be a candidate for replacing OCaml in that sequence as anything with better error messages would be very welcome.

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skrishnamurthi12y ago

I am not a fan of that sequence of languages, and the fact that it seems to keep changing every so often shows that the course(pair) hasn't yet found a canonical, good answer.

However, I don't see any reason why Pyret needs to be the _second_ language. OCaml is brought in to introduce types (amongst other things) because Racket doesn't have them. Pyret eliminates that need.

There are other reasons, too. But this sounds like a debate we should be having in a hallway, not on the Web. (-:

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