Learning Lounge

[Jeff Cutsinger]

On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 05:30  AM, PB wrote:
> - once you know a language, you know them all
Hah. When I see C programmers (or even lisp programmers!) writing something
nontrivial in maude I'll believe it.

I think the TLL would ideally use a cleaned up (not buffed up like bigloo)
implementation or, more appropriately, dialect of scheme, with a good
development environment. PLT unfortunately is not quite good enough. After the
programmer had learned the basics there, we would proceed to build an
interpreter, and play with it, kind of like in the sicp. This way you would
address the many vs one language problem in a unique way: the learner needs
only one language, but builds many to understand important concepts. Scheme,
or in this case a language even simpler than scheme, is very very easy to
learn, not to mention it already has basic formal underpinnings. Scheme may be
a pretty crappy language, but it is good for teaching, learning, and research.
Obviously this would only suffice for the basics/foundations. We could move up
into maude or something powerful enough to express advanced tunes concepts.

An alternative would be to attempt to get the learner into maude or equivalent
as soon as possible.

Or slate may be pretty good for this purpose.

Just some thoughts,
-seaslug