teaching Clean to undergraduate students

Matt Fairtlough m.fairtlough@dcs.shef.ac.uk
Thu, 15 Apr 1999 15:47:41 +0100 (BST)


Dear Rinus,

Thank you very much for your prompt and very encouraging response to
my request for help.

  From: rinus plasmeijer <rinus@cs.kun.nl>
  To: clean-list@cs.kun.nl
  Subject: Re: teaching Clean to undergraduate students
  Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 15:43:58 +0200

  > We are going to teach Clean to 120 first year undergraduate students
  > for the first time next September, and I will be one of the lecturers.
  > 
  > I understand that Clean is taught at Nijmegen (if I am right, I would
  > be interested to know at which level it is taught), and I wonder if
  > there are any suitable teaching materials for a first programming
  > course for first year students?  

  We have teached Clean for many years to second year students.
  This year, for the first time, 
  we have teached Clean in the first year, first semester.

Oh, excellent news!  This is also good publicity for me, as I
suggested and championed Clean in the first place.  So, if I
understand you, you taught Clean for the first time to first year
students last semester?

  There is an improved version of the book (not yet on the net due to lack
  of time).

Is there an estimated publication date yet?  I imagine this will not
be before the end of the year, though, so not in time for first
semester courses in the 1999-2000 academic year.  If things work out
with Clean, we will make it a core text and will want to buy quite a
few copies for our library and make sure the local bookshop stocks it.

  I fully admit that not all material is suited, especially the IO chapter
  is much to hard for first year students.

Yes; I have not mastered it yet, either!

  Peter Achten has teached the IO stuf this year and prepared sheets and
  lots of GUI exercises which might be useful.

That would be useful, especially later on in the course, or possibly
as self-study material for students who want to go on to use Clean for
their projects.

  We also work on an updated version of the tutorial on the Object IO
  library written by Peter Achten (now including printing and TCP/IP
  handling).

Excellent.  At the moment we are having problems using the Object IO
1.01 apparently due to bugs in the IDE; I have submitted a bug report.

  Perhaps we can work together to update the material such that we are
  both happy?

Yes, that is an excellent idea.  I will be teaching the new Clean
course jointly with Phil Green, who has many years' experience teaching 
functional programming (in Lisp) as a first programming language in a
first year, first semester course, so his experience should be
invaluable.  To start with, however, we will want to create teaching
materials that cover the basics of Clean, without I/O.  Are you
interested in working with us on this?

  For the new Clean compiler a new reference manual will be made as well.
  Also a new Clean IDE using the Clean object I/O library is under
  construction (a PC version first, Mac version later)
  usinfg a new editor (written by Arjan IJzendoorn).
  Suggestions for improvements are welcome.

would be interesting indeed.  I look forward to seeing the new IDE.

Best wishes, and looking forward to a fruitful collaboration,

Matt.