Enough about traditional languages. How about DrScheme? DrScheme does indeed meet the requirements we listed earlier:

• Scheme has a simple, regular syntax
• DrScheme's Interactions window is interactive and encourages experimentation; it saves students (and teachers!) the burden of learning messy (and weak) i/o features
• When a program executes an erroneous operation, DrScheme immediately halts execution, highlights the incorrect expression, and prints an error message explaining what the error is
• DrScheme incorporates simple and powerful graphics features that students can use within a few weeks of starting to program, and which run on all platforms without change
• The DrScheme environment is designed for beginners: it presents Scheme as a sequence of growing dialects where the smaller dialects have fewer keywords and catch more of the typical errors made by students; in contrast, a beginning programmer in C++ cannot use new as an identifier even though its context, objects, will not be taught for many weeks (or semesters) to come

• Arithmetic doesn't behave ``funny'':
  • It is predictable and familiar
  • It has no unnatural restrictions
• Operations are checked before they execute
• Scheme does automatic memory management

All this results in many pedagogic benefits:

• Teachers cover more material; this is especially an issue for teachers who have to cover the AP curriculum in a single year
• Students get more interesting exercises, because they are soon using structures, lists, and graphics, which more closely correspond to actual programs that they use
• Scheme prepares students for future advances like Java, which are much closer to Scheme than to C++
• It empowers teachers and students through technology: the programming language and environment are amongst the first, and most important, technologies that a student of programming encounters, and languages like Scheme and systems like DrScheme are just plain better and more advanced

Last modified at 16:02:46 CST on Sunday, February 08, 1998