Whither Scheme? 21st Century Approaches To Scheme In Cs1

摘要

Since the decline of Pascal as a "standard" introductory language in the late 1970's and early 1980's, faculty members have adopted (and, often, discarded) a variety of languages for the introductory course: C, C++, Java, Modula-2, Ada, Python, Ruby, and more. Different approaches and different opinions have led to a number of "language wars" in the SIGCSE community, wars that we hope to avoid in this panel. Throughout this period, Scheme has had a constant audience. A wide variety of schools, from small liberal arts colleges to major research universities, have adopted and stuck with Scheme. Many begin with Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), although a wide variety of approaches have evolved since then. To its adopters, Scheme has many strengths, including a simple syntax, a small language definition, the ability to consider multiple paradigms, and the power of higher-order programming. The Scheme community remains strong, in part, because of DrScheme, an open-source development environment appropriate for novices. Although DrScheme was developed in the context of How to Design Programs and the TeachScheme project (which provides its own 21st century approach to Scheme in CS1), DrScheme is used in a wide variety of contexts. More than twenty years have passed since the publication of SICP. In those twenty years, the face of computing has changed significantly. When modern students think of computing, they think of things like Google, Wikis, graphics, games, and more. Is there still a role for Scheme in this new world of computing? In this panel, we consider some ways in which introductory courses currently use Scheme, strategies that preserve the strengths of Scheme while incorporating "new computing".