Inspired by a Diaspora* post about simple gui programming in Red , I played with gui programming in Racket. Just a few tweaks to the example in Racket's Windowing documentation(fn:2) and a button in a frame shows an insult. Gui programming seemed too complex too learn, but the Red example got me over the off-putting idea. For some tasks, gui-programming might be simpler and shorter than generating html pages.

The code and .csv data are below

Since Racket grew out of Scheme, and Scheme is a honed Lisp, maybe Learning Racket Through Examples should start with list . It might be fun to introduce some of this on a white-board while learners guess how DrRacket will respond. With four or five procedures (functions?) to play with, how much time would learners like to spend trying out various combinations?

Would these examples be suggestive enough for English-language learners to think about the meaning of list , map , build , string , character , integer ....

A student having trouble in English class came for some help. We ended up talking about computers, programming, and free software. The next time, he came with his computer. It seemed to be the computer recommended and sold by the university co-op. The computer booted into the MS Windows OS, so the easiest way to get started seemed to be with DrRacket. There wasn't much time to play with Inkscape, Gimp, or Emacs. The student seemed to enjoy DrRacket. He wanted to play with big numbers, so I had to figure out the term for exponent and how to do exponents ( (expt 6 36) )with the Racket Language.

The episode has been in my mind for the last nine months or so. After learning Scheme's iota and Racket's plot over the past month or so I'm wondering if this sort of sequence might be fun for learners with a desire to play with numbers.