This repository records some initial notes from the very beginning of the TeachScheme!/PLT Scheme project. The files listed below are notes that Bruce Duba, Shriram Krishnamurthi, or I took after design meetings or after reflecting on design meetings.
matthias% ls -l
total 136
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 759 Mar 29 1995 INDENTATION
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 377 Mar 29 1995 INTERACTION
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 1684 Mar 9 1995 LIST
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 35 Aug 29 1995 TODO
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 1438 Feb 23 1995 ex1
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 843 Feb 2 1995 syntax.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 2340 Mar 27 1995 syntax10
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 1749 Mar 30 1995 syntax11
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 1516 Apr 17 1995 syntax12
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 986 Feb 17 1995 syntax2.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 1235 Feb 18 1995 syntax3
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 2250 Feb 20 1995 syntax4
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 2057 Feb 23 1995 syntax5
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 2527 Feb 27 1995 syntax6
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 2142 Mar 2 1995 syntax7
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 2583 Mar 2 1995 syntax8
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthias staff 2205 Mar 27 1995 syntax9
The meetings started way before this, but unfortunately there were no cell phones to take picture of blackboard designs, the paper designs are lost, the arguments and design rationales were oral, so this is what we got.
As for the actual date, here is an email that I recently sent to Matthew, Robby, Jay, and Sam.
"So here is my calculation of dating Racket neé PLT Scheme to 28 January 1995.
Wednesday 25 January 1995
POPL used to be a Monday thru Wednesday noon affair. Cormac presented his future paper there (a static analysis on how to eliminate implicit touch operations; we also had the infamous Felleisen-Wadler paper there) and we were flying back from SFO to IAH, arriving quite late that day. I got home and sent email that we’d have a meeting next morning.
Thursday 26 January 1995
We all met in Corky’s office because it was bigger than mine. I announced that I wanted to leave theory behind and build a curriculum and the language and the support software to use FP to teach math-y and programming-y thingies across the curriculum in pre-college. Shriram clearly embraced the idea, Corky thought I was borderline. Bruce loved the chance to design a new language. We discussed for quite a while and came to two conclusions: the PhD students needed to focus on sw issues for dissertations in case we'd fail (Corky was sure we would and indicated he didn’t really want to go along) and Bruce and I would focus on the language and the curriculum. Bruce and I discussed this more and came to the conclusion that we needed a notation that was close to text books.
Friday 27 January 1995
We met again after my lecture (PL) and started sketching out this plan to everyone. We didn’t know how to make graphs and certain symbols (like integration, unicode was not on our horizon) and discussed how we’d go about the software dev tasks (as in we study SE techniques while doing our development; my only idea at the time to get dissertations).
Bruce and I started designing Jam (which is where the name Jam 2000 came from for the machine simulator I taught next fall in 210.)
Saturday 28 January 1995
A few weeks later Matthew showed me mzscheme/mred and told me has “cobbled it together over the weekend”. I am sure he didn’t use “cobble” but something close.
Ergo, this is the birthday .. in my mind.
...
Everything like this is a “founding myth.” All I am pretty sure about is that the first key strokes of conception probably took place on that day (cross-producting my memory with my understanding of Matthew). "
Teaching and paper-writing obligations took over in April 1995, and I was eager to get our pedagogic ideas in front of teachers and students. So instead of implementing the syntax and a translation to PLT Scheme, I focused on writing up teaching material.
After launching TeachScheme! with PLT Scheme and Chez in the summer of 1995, I wrote an NSF proposal to the EHR division a year later. Even though I felt that the teaching with ()s had gone well in 95, I proposed to develop an alternative syntax, like the above, extended with the kind of symbols mathematics high school texts used.
The response from NSF's reviewers was pretty clear. This is a great idea, but needs more evidence before we can fund it at that scale. (They eventually did.) BUT, why change the notation when you already have one that works? People can adapt.