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by swat17
3480 days ago
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For what it's worth, I'm a student at the University at which J Politz teaches. I haven't taken the programming languages course which is taught in Pyret, but it's worth noting that it's an upper level course here and everyone I know who's taken it is a fairly experienced programmer (relative to university CS standards, of course). So, if the fear is that Pyret is an unrealistic/overly complex/non transferable language to learn, it's definitely not marketted towards beginners here. By the time you're taking this class, you should already be well versed in Python and C++. |
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The programming languages course in question (https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~jpolitz/cs91/s15/) indeed used Pyret, and that course is a heavy functional programming implementation course (writing interpreters, type inference, GC, etc).
That's using Pyret for more complex programming, and is the upper end of where we use it pedagogically right now. Ditto for CS019 (the advanced introduction to data structures), and CS173 (PL) at Brown. In all of those cases, students _are_ expected to have some prior programming experience, so they get a faster introduction to Pyret.
In the other direction, Pyret is in active use at the middle and high school level in math, cs, and physics classes, and this is where much of our active design work is tailored (tables, reactors, etc have some explicit curricular goals they target). They have scaffolding and workbooks written for their grade level, use features suitable for the context they are in, and so on.
The use in CS91 in particular is
(1) appropriate in the first place, since many functional languages could work in that setting, (2) eating my own dogfood, and (3) an excellent opportunity to discuss design decisions of a language that students are learning in a PL course, while it is still having design decisions made about it!