Daniel, I think you're missing my point or I may have not said it correctly. You can use clojure to teach basic programming concepts but that has already been done in other languages and thats why we don't really see that work or discussion being done with clojure. You cannot say teaching the advanced topics of concurrency and macro writing is easy to a beginner to programming who doesn't even know what a variable is. The main advantages of clojure are on non-trivial topics and this is what the core developers work on and thus, we haven't seen much development in teaching concepts that are also solved in older languages.
I certainly encourage the idea of teaching clojure to beginners so that more will be familiar with the syntax. Modifying your words, its more like I said, "They are newbs who don't grasp programming, so they should take some basic programming classes before learning about the more advanced topics like macro writing", otherwise most of the content will be useless to them. (Also it would be great if that class used clojure as the language, but I wouldn't have that expectation). While I can teach the big picture concepts or advantages of using things like transactions with diagrams and other learning aids, having the student properly utilize that information and from it produce code will take a lot of time. As a personal account, learning pointers was HARD, I really didn't get the concept of pointers until the beginning of highschool in self study. I wasn't able to use pointers in code reliably until college. In an example like basketball, I wouldn't expect a person to start practicing crossups if he couldn't even dribble a ball. Keep in mind, I'm not saying concurrency is harder than pointers, I'm just saying it comes later in the learning experience compared to other basics. This is different than a, clojure is only for elites viewpoint. Best, Brent On Jun 29, 12:54 am, Daniel Gagnon <redalas...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Brent Millare > <brent.mill...@gmail.com>wrote: > > > While I agree his wording wasn't really the best, I think it can also > > be interpreted differently depending on what kind of n00b he is > > talking about. > > Your wording isn't much better or maybe it's the idea underneath that > doesn't sit right. You basically said "They are newbs who couldn't grasp our > language, we are elite but there's no shame in being a newb because what we > do is so hard!" > > It's not harder to learn Clojure's concurrency than pointers or tons of > others things we teach beginners every day. I'd totally teach clojure as a > first language. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
