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000119_icon-group-sender_Fri Oct 27 12:31:05 2000.msg
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Received: (from root@localhost)
by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.11.1/8.11.1) id e9RJUsJ26852
for icon-group-addresses; Fri, 27 Oct 2000 12:30:54 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200010271930.e9RJUsJ26852@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
From: Bob Ardler <ardler@argonet.co.uk>
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 15:48:23 +0100
Subject: Re: Yet another Newbie question....
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Steve Wampler :
> This reminds me of "I can write FORTRAN in any language".
Algol, actually.
> By forcing these languages to match a conventional model...
Forcing? Surely Icon was deliberately given a familiar procedural
look to make it easier to learn and use?
> ...you are losing most of the advantages that the language offers.
> In that case, why bother with learning the language?
It's good to see you raising this pedagogic issue: 'teach one thing
at a time' versus 'sense the spirit, experience the epiphany, grab
the gestalt' - Wordsworth's boing or pling (One impulse from a vernal
wood [boinggg!!!] May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of
good, Than all the sages can).
I think it's ok to teach or learn one thing at a time, building
confidence, trying 1 new harder thing each day until the boing comes.
Especially if there's a homework deadline. The alternative is
grovelling to sensei while he slaps you across the gob and says
where's your ki or align your sakai tanden to objects and classes,
getting pissed and giving up, while sensei says no talent good
riddance.
> ...Some languages actually make it easy to think about problems
> more "naturally" (note that this isn't the same as "conventionally"
> and may, in fact, vary with the problem domain).
Very true. True of Icon, whose design also has pedagogic merits, with
a familiar look for an easy start and many enticing features. Still,
its one-liners make learning hard because the flow of control is
elusive. Shamin's:
>> line ? while tab(upto(&letters)) do move(1)
took him paragraphs to elucidate (he modestly added "The books
explain all this much better than I can!", but in fact he explained
very well and maybe should contribute a chapter on the scan
expression).
I still think some sort of labelled graph showing control flow for
1-liners involving scan, generators, coexpressions etc would be
useful to teachers and some users.
> ...ask an algebra class to express "X must be between 0 and 15,
> inclusive". Then ask a group of students at the end of a course on
> C (or Java, or any conventional language). Also a group of set
> theorists.
Give the set theorists a<b<c<d<e & wipe their smirks.
> ...same of a group of students who have just learned Icon...
Good experiment. Can't see how you could make a<b<c work without
value-of-2nd-term else fail. A special false wouldn't work unless it
aborted evaluation, which would be fail. I'll be damned, not just a
pretty feature.
--
Bob Ardler, ardler@argonet.co.uk