Hello Jean,
While this is interesting, I dispute the underlying assumption. Why do
you say infix notation is easier for beginners? There's no evidence for
this. And there is a huge amount of evidence against it. For very many
years MIT taught computer science 6.001 exclusively in Scheme to
freshmen with _no_ programming experience and they all took to it like
to ducks to water. There was never any complaint that it was hard to
learn. This is a well known fact. Now, of course, MIT freshman are the
creme de la creme, and the course lecturers for many years were Abelson
and Sussman, authors of SICP. Nevertheless, there is nothing
intrinsically _easier_ about infix languages compared to LISP and
Scheme. What one could say is that people with previous experience of
infix languages may feel disoriented. But as with music, it's only a
matter of familiarity. And people have noted that when learning LISP
there is always initial perplexity and then almost everyone undergoes a
sudden epiphany where it all makes sense. Many have written about that
experience.
I'd argue for leaving Scheme alone and encouraging people to go ahead
with it as it. With an editor like emacs it makes all the parentheses
easy. [But then there are people who think emacs is too hard! SIgh.]
I do a lot of work in Haskell. It's superb for making domain specific
languages. On odd days I think it would be great to make a DSL for
Lilypond. Then I come to my senses by the afternoon!
While I am not an expert in pedagogy, I have a hunch that starting
people off on a specialised infix variant of a Scheme-like language may
make it _harder_ for them to learn Scheme when the time comes.
I'm not sure why everything has to be approachable for beginners
nowadays. Perhaps that's why Latin in no longer taught. It's not easily
approachable by beginners! Yes we need more developers in the Lilypond
community, but they really do have to be conversant with lamda calculus
and the lot, not something similar to Python.
Andrew
On 10/08/2022 7:45 am, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
Hi,
Some time ago, Jacques Menu asked on the French-speaking equivalent of
this list if it would be possible to create an infix syntax for Scheme
that would be more approachable for beginners.
