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Comment by _hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

Practical Typography (written by the same author) has been a wonderful resource for me. Sometime I'll get around to working through this book as well. My high school is actually one of the last places to teach Racket/Scheme as an introductory language. Personally I find it a wonderful way of teaching the basics of computation and recursion. I wish more schools still taught it.

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Several universities still teach racket as an intro language. Ex: Brown, Northeastern, Northwestern, etc.

The authors of Racket specially avoid arguments about teaching language X in introductory CS. The pedagogy and curriculum are significantly more factors in effectively teaching CS [1]. The design of Racket with its restricted languages reflects that.

[1] https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/curriculum-design/

This is an essay by the creator/author of How To Design Programs (currently at Northeastern) that lays out the pedagogy well:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Thoughts/Developing_Dev...

The speaker in the talk linked is a previous Ph.D. student of the author above.

Northeastern, Brown, Northwestern, and Waterloo all use the approach in HTDP as far as I'm aware, even if they don't use the book itself. Racket just happens to be the language of choice (or rather X Student Languages are, not even Racket) because they fit the pedagogy well.

Yale's intro CS class uses Racket: https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs201/

"Practical Typography (written by the same author) has been a wonderful resource for me."

Yet his webpage fonts give me an absolute headache.

That doesn't give me a good gut feeling about "Beautiful Racket."

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