Why Scheme for Introductory Programming?

Questions and Answers

• FAQ about Scheme as a first language
• FAQ about incorporating TeachScheme! into a high school curriculum
• On Scheme and Saleability
• Why some teachers and students dislike this approach
• Why not teach the latest thing?

Testimonials

• Dr. Prabhakar Ragde describes teaching his nine-year-old daughter to program.
• High school teacher Dean Morse on girls in high school computer science courses
• High school CS teacher Paul Fisher reflects on his first year of teaching a TeachScheme!-style course
• High school math teacher Michel P (?) and his/her C++ students
• High school teacher Michael Hunt reports on his first three weeks of Algebra I class
• Karen Buras on the benefits of this technique for the weaker students
• One of Karen Buras's former high school students
• The EE professional parent of one of the students in Louise Hilton's high school class
• End-of-term comments from a number of high school students
• High school teacher Duncan Innes reports
• High school teacher Karen North's C++ vs. Scheme experiment
• High school student Andrew Scoby's end-of-term report
• Middle school teacher Annette Walter discusses using Scheme to teach algebra
• High school teacher Jane Sutherland's conversion
• A series of progress reports from middle-school teacher Dan Anderson, including his students' winning science fair projects
• Suradet Jitprapaikulsarn's experience with pre-AP and AP students learning Scheme
• Feedback from one of Dr. Ragde's students who had previous programming experience.
• Brief quotes from teachers who have participated in the TeachScheme! workshops
• Bill Abresch on Web development using DrScheme
• Robb Cutler on teaching AP CS starting in Scheme
• Todd O'Bryan on teaching AP CS starting in Scheme
• Monterrey Tech experiment on pre-AP in Scheme
• EdScheme experiment on programming contests
• Reactions from Java-first students on learning Scheme

Articles

• A Scheme Story, an article by student Natasha Chen on her experiences (from 6th through 12th grades) in BASIC, Pascal, Logo, and Scheme. Note that the languages in which she was so frustrated by memorizing syntax -- BASIC and Pascal -- have far less syntax to memorize than the currently popular Java and C++.
• Scheme and Java in the First Year, a paper published in the Journal of Computing in Small Colleges, May 2000.
• Lisp as an Alternative to Java, an article comparing the performance of the same programs written in C++, Java, and Lisp or Scheme. In brief, it concludes that the Lisp/Scheme programs ran about as fast as C++ programs, significantly faster than Java programs, and that they were developed far faster than either C++ or Java programs.
• Two talks presented by TeachScheme! team members at regional educators' conferences
• Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, an article about what it really takes to learn to program. Not specific to Scheme, but discusses what different kinds of languages to learn, and why, and in what order.

Scheme in the Real World

Who uses Scheme or Lisp in the real world? Actually, quite a lot of people.

• Derivatives trading firm Jane Street Capital does most of its work in the functional programming language OCaml, and specifies "experience with functional programming languages (OCaml, SML, Scheme, Haskell, Lisp, F#, Erlang, etc)" in its hiring. See their presentation about how and why they switched to functional programming.
• Beating the Averages describes the development of Yahoo! Store, a Web-based application for building e-commerce sites, and how doing it in Lisp allowed him to add new features faster than his competitors could. See also Lisp in Web-based Applications, from a talk by Paul Graham about the same software.
• Extremely Successful Software, a similar "success story" article about using Pair Programming, a lean and customer-responsive management style, and Lisp to develop software.
• Graham also has an article about why Orbitz and other travel sites are written largely in Lisp
• Continue is a commercial Web application for managing academic conferences and workshops, written entirely in Scheme.
• Margrave is a security policy analyzer written in Scheme.
• Abstrax provides software for "build to order" manufacturing plants, writing most of the software in Scheme.
• NASA uses software written in Lisp to control autonomous spacecraft and manage mission plans for Mars landers.
• I'm told that Disney controls virtual rides, the Air Force controls telescope batteries, the Navy runs its weather service for carrier-borne jet fighters, Motorola runs its ordering system for packaging hardware, a number of Russian banks control their Web-based account access, and Pixar Animation does a lot of its animation, using software written in Scheme or Lisp. I don't have details on these projects.
• Kathi Fisler's list of articles about real-world uses.

Ever visit a gym? You were wasting your time. I've never seen a Nautilus machine or a treadmill outside a gym. Barbells -- repeatedly lifting two balanced weights connected by a narrower piece of metal -- completely contrived and artificial...

At the high end, Scheme has long had a number of features that other languages have only recently added, e.g. lexical closures (as in Python, Ruby, C#, and Perl 5) and continuations (as in Ruby).

To find other schools and teachers who use this approach, try a Google search for htdp.org or a Google search for drscheme.org.