CISC-280 Program Development Techniques

Extra Credit Homework #1

10 Points - Due: Tuesday, September 9th

In this class we will be using scheme as a programming language that we will use to understand programming concepts. This language will make many of you feel uncomfortable - and you may think that it is useless. You may find it surprising that scheme has been exploited to make some commercial successes. Before making any judgments, you really need to see and understand what the language can do for you.

Lest you think that the language has no "real" value, you need to read the paper:  Beating the Averages by Paul Graham.  To give you incentive for doing that, your exptra credit assignment is to read this paper and answer these two questions:

  1. What did you take away as the main point of this paper?
  2. What did you find most surprising/most contraversial?
You may also find the following two papers of interest:  Can Your Programming Language Do This? and  
CUFP-2006. Your answers will help us focus the dicsussion of why we are using scheme that will take place on Thursday.