ActionScript as a teaching language

[Peter]

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005, William Park wrote:

>> Another option would be Erlang.
>>
>> It has much of the "Prolog nature," notably including the notion that
>> data is immutable, once values have been determined.  In effect, you
>> don't have "variables;" you bind values to names.
>>
>> Unlike Prolog, which generally tries to be as near as possible to
>> untyped (sort of like Perl and Tcl), Erlang is strongly typed.  It is
>> similar to ML in that type information can commonly be inferred; you
>> often do not need to declare the types.
>>
>> And there are substantial applications written in Erlang; Ericsson has
>> been known to implement phone switches in the language, which is an
>> enormously-parallel application if there ever was one.
>
> It boggles rational mind that such esoteric languagues could even be
> mentioned in the context of High School computer cirriculum.

But ... that 'interactive geometry' package that they are using is in 
fact a heavily watered-down version of Matlab or Scilab, yes ?

Also Logo, Lisp and Prolog can be said to be birds of a feather (with 
Logo requiring the least typing, followed by Prolog and followed by Lisp 
after a large gap).

Then there is this Smalltalk based environment for children I found. It 
runs as a plugin in a browser:

http://www.squeakland.org/

I am impressed (but the screen size works out wrong under my window 
manager).

Peter
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