Preface

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming

Many professions require some form of computer programming. Accountants program spreadsheets and word processors; photographers program photo editors; musicians program synthesizers; and professional programmers instruct plain computers. Programming has become a required skill.

Yet programming is more than just a vocational skill. Indeed, good programming is a fun activity, a creative outlet, and a way to express abstract ideas in a tangible form. And designing programs teaches a variety of skills that are important in all kinds of professions: critical reading, analytical thinking, creative synthesis, and attention to detail.

We therefore believe that the study of program design deserves the same central role in general education as mathematics and English. Or, put more succinctly, everyone should learn how to design programs.

On one hand, program design teaches the same analytical skills as mathematics. But, unlike mathematics, working with programs is an active approach to learning. Interacting with software provides immediate feedback and thus leads to exploration, experimentation, and self-evaluation. Furthermore, designing programs produces useful and fun things, which vastly increases the sense of accomplishment when compared to drill exercises in mathematics. On the other hand, program design teaches the same analytical reading and writing skills as English. Even the smallest programming tasks are formulated as word problems. Without critical reading skills, a student cannot design programs that match the specification. Conversely, good program design methods force a student to articulate thoughts about programs in proper English.

The Design Recipe for Functions Problem Analysis & Data Definition Contract, Purpose & Effect Statements, Header Examples Function Template Function Definition Tests Figure: The basic steps of a program design recipe

This book is the first book on programming as the core subject of a liberal arts education. Its main focus is the design process that leads from problem statements to well-organized solutions; it deemphasizes the study of programming language details, algorithmic minutiae, and specific application domains. Our desire to focus on the design process requires two radical innovations for introductory courses. The first innovation is a set of explicit design guidelines. Existing curricula tend to provide vague and ill-defined suggestions, such as ``design from top to bottom'' or ``make the program structural.'' We have instead developed design guidelines that lead students from a problem statement to a computational solution in step-by-step fashion with well-defined intermediate products. In the process they learn to read, to analyze, to organize, to experiment, to think in a systematic manner. The second innovation is a radically new programming environment. In the past, texts on programming ignored the role of the programming environment in the learning process; they simply assumed that students had access to a professional environment. This book provides a programming environment for beginners. It also grows with the students as they master more and more of the material until it supports a full-fledged language for the whole spectrum of programming tasks: large-scale programming as well as scripting.

Our guidelines are formulated as a number of program design recipes. A design recipe guides a beginning programmer through the entire problem-solving process. With design recipes, a beginner almost never again stares at a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen. Instead, the student will check the design recipe and use the question-and-answer guidelines to make some progress.

We created the design recipes by identifying categories of problems. The identification of a problem category is based on the classes of data that are used to represent the relevant information. Starting from the structure of this class description students derive the programs with a checklist. Figure  shows the basic six steps of a design recipe checklist. Each step produces a well-defined intermediate product:

1. the description of the class of problem data;
2. the informal specification of a program's behavior;
3. the illustration of the behavior with examples;
4. the development of a program template or layout;
5. the transformation of the template into a complete definition; and
6. the discovery of errors through testing.

Design recipes help beginners and teachers alike. Teachers can use the recipes to inspect a beginner's problem-solving skills, to diagnose weaknesses, and to suggest specific remedial steps. After all, each stage of the design recipe yields a well-defined, checkable product. If a beginner is stuck, a teacher can inspect the intermediate products and determine what the problem is. Based on this analysis, the teacher can then provide guidance for a specific step in the recipe, raise appropriate questions, and recommend additional practice exercises.

• Why Everyone Should Learn to Program
• Design Recipes
• The Choice of Scheme and DrScheme
• The Parts of the Book
• Acknowledgments