On Monday, July 15, 2019 at 9:52:43 AM UTC-4, cwebber wrote: > > Maciek Godek writes: > > > Maybe the direction similar to where "I think we should be heading" is > > somewhere between Mathematica notebooks and Smalltalk's object > environments. > > I had similar-ish thoughts while watching the excellent Fructure talk at > this year's RacketCon: maybe intro courses would be more willing to pick > up Racket and not be scared of its syntax if the default educational > language was more like Scratch. One nice thing about Fructure is that > it didn't present any parentheses, but I suspect that the way that it > presented grouping meant that if you eventually switched from that mode > of writing code over to textual parenthetical notification, it would > feel like a fairly natural shift. >
I've put a package tightlight on the server that “tightens” the highlighting in DrRacket: Pointing out that it's essentially Scratch's syntax has been helpful in many discussions, as has using it with faint blue parentheses reminiscent of the subtle lined paper lines that many are used to not noticing consciously. There's a View menu item to turn off the outlines, change whether the outline boxes are horizontally and/or vertically inset, or revert to standard DrRacket. The package was a hack for a colleague who was teaching our course for non-majors in 2012, and we still use it. The implementation is a hack because some method needing to be overriden was private or final, so every method that used it was copied to intercept that use. Also, I can't resist exploring coding approaches so all the copied code was rewritten in various ways. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/e8624fd3-fc40-4437-8948-cddd65e6c7c5%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
