Jeremy Tregunna wrote: > If you can teach someone to program, learning a new language isn't > going to be a big problem. Your decision should be less about the > language and more about the concepts you need to be teaching. Scheme > is an excellent language for teaching people how to program. Sure, > most of them are unlikely to use scheme much if ever in day to day > operations on the job (if they choose to go down this path and stick > with it), but it's an excellent language to teach programming concepts. I completely agree with the above. >> So, given all of that, I have two questions for ya, list. One, do >> you think there's any merit from teaching pretty non-technical >> sophomores in highschool Ruby over Scheme? > > No, I don't. Keep the language simple, teach them how to program; > those who continue on with programming will find languages that they > wish to pursue, and will learn those when the time is appropriate. And almost agree with this too. Knowing almost nothing about Scheme (it's a lisp), and not prejudiced agaist it at all (honestly), a possible advantage of Ruby could be that its libraries let you do some really fun stuff very quickly, cleanly and easily. I can imagine that being extremely appealing in a learning environment. However, there may be equally wonderful libraries for Scheme, in which case this is a moot point. The other possible advantage with Ruby is that it has a current, active community (which, again, Scheme may have; I don't know), and if these children are good at looking for things for themselves (which I hope they are), then they may have more luck with Ruby in this respect. Having made those two points, I would expect Scheme to have more teaching environment material available for it - potted courses, teacher's notes, etc; I believe it was originally conceived as a teaching oriented language (this may well show my total ignorance!). Once again though, Jeremy Tregunna is absolutely right that concepts are transferable, and there's not a great deal of value in choosing a teaching language because of current "real world" use.