Re: Scheme tutorial

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@alum.mit.edu>]

Greg Harvey wrote:
> 
> "Ian Bicking" <bickiia@earlham.edu> writes:
>
> > The tutorial I'm thinking about would assume that the reader has
> > programmed before, but not in Scheme.
> >
> > So, a few questions: is anyone working on this?  Are there any
> > such Schemey tutorials out there that I haven't seen?  Ones that
> > don't start with the much-maligned factorial example?  I haven't
> > read through the various Script-Fu tutorials as much as I should,
> > but they seem to have the right perspective.
> 
> I don't think anyone's currently working on this (it would be very
> cool, though).
> 

Agreed.
 
> You might want to include bits of both. For demonstrating scheme,
> building a small list library might be a good base, since this would
> allow you to naturally introduce things like first-class functions and
> tail recursion, as well as most of the primitives 

I think it would be more useful to make (at least one part of) the tutorial 
targeted towards  end-user scripting type tasks - text processing, filesystem 
operations, etc. The Perl/Python/Tcl tutorials would be a better model here 
than CL ones.

 
> One thing you definately should make a priority, though, is
> continuations, since these are probably the hardest thing to figure
> out for newbies to scheme.

I don't think continuations should be mentioned at all in a tutorial aimed
at new users. I really doubt they will need them.