Chris Cunnington <smalltalktelevision at gmail.com> writes:

> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: medium; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; ">
> "there is a
> book of a very similar title, entitled _The Scheme Programming Language._"
> Yes. Dybvig&#39;s book. I have the third edition, though I understand
> a fourth has appeared. It seems a lot easier to me to learn about
> Scheme from that book than HTDP, which I think has some kind of
> pedagogical framework that at odds with my own hacker "break it to
> learn it" mentality. 

I think that I know what you mean.  I have had problems in reading HtDP
as well, mainly because I have found that book far too boring to read 
through; it does not encourage exploration, and tends to take the fun
out of programming.  While SICP relies on too much domain knowlege (although I
still like SICP very much, some of the exercises in that book assume too
much "ad hoc insight" (to quote page 11 of "The Structure and
Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum (see
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf))), HtDP does not
encourage exploration enough.

The closest balance between the two extremes that I have discovered so
far is the textbook _Concrete Abstractions: An Introduction to Computer
Science Using Scheme_ (see
http://gustavus.edu/+max/concrete-abstractions.html), by Max Hailperin,
Barbara Kaiser, and Karl Knight.  However, even that book is somewhat
too elementary for my taste.

> The only reason I care about Scheme at all is to learn about continuations and then see what applies in Seaside. I want a strong multimedia future for Squeak. I love pumping code from Beginning OpenGL Game Programming into Croquet, but I spend most of my time looking at Seaside code. How ResponseContinuation was replaced by WARenderContinuation and WARedirectContinuation (and has changed again in Seaside 3.0), which I supposed might be an example of Continuation Passing Style, explained by Dybvig, because they aren&#39;t continuations at all ...
> Yes. Web development is important to this Squeaker. Chris </span>

Interesting.  Your interests seem to coincide with my own interests in
Scheme, which mainly focus on continuations, too.  I am interested in
learning Cobalt for its multimedia applications; it seems well-suited to
creating a certain kind of virtual world.  It's too bad that active
development for Croquet has stopped since late 2006 in favor of Cobalt
(see http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Croquet_SDK).  On another
note, it is unfortunate that Scheme is weak in the area of multimedia
support.

I am currently looking for volunteer collaborators to help create a
certain kind of virtual world application in Cobalt.  Byy any chance,
are you interested in creating a virtual world in Cobalt?

-- Benjamin L. Russell
-- 
Benjamin L. Russell  /   DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/
Translator/Interpreter / Mobile:  +011 81 80-3603-6725
"Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^