Lisp

Hi folks,

is anyone of you teaching their kids Clojure as I do? A couple of years ago I decided to home school my kids because I wanted to teach them programming in a lispy language in conjunction with mathematics as early as possible (7+ years of age, after finishing their first year in the elementary school). So, I made a private course for my kids and created a series of hand-drawn comic textbooks full of maths combined with all the lispy goodness.

I thought it would be a nice experiment as I was not sure if the concept of LFL—Lisp as First (programming) Language can really work. You know, there are these theories that before fully appreciating a lispy language, you have to experience the horrors of ‘garbage languages’ first… Also, Clojure is not exactly a pedagogical language, is it? At some point, I was thinking about creating my own Lisp dialect for the purpose. But I wanted something to support functional approach, lazy evaluation, and having a collection of nice data structures, so why bother making another language if Clojure suits my needs (almost) perfectly (there are some features that I do not like that much but I guess nothing is perfect) and, yes, my spare time was also a limiting factor.

I have been doing this for five years now and it has been a fascinating journey. I really like how it works together with teaching maths and boosts abstract thinking. Some of my friends showed interest in what I was doing (apparently, they wanted the same fine education for their kids), so I decided to make an official series of books, the first was just published and can be purchased on Lulu (the plan is to make 3 volumes per year). In addition to that, I will be posting ‘my pedagogical notes’ (and later problem-oriented web-based programming environments) on Patreon for those who would like to follow this path. This project takes a substantial amount of my time, so any support from you fellow lispers is highly appreciated!

Project home with book preview: https://prog-mat.com

Any thoughts?