Re: An infix syntax for Scheme ...

[Andrew Bernard]

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.