Hello Nehal,
here are several tangent thoughts.
First: PicoLisp is great for mathematics, as long as you stay with integers or
fractions (frac.l). Working with 2.321 by *Scl is cumbersome and there is no
good way to hide the scaling for a new users yet. Even when it is very
irritating. I would claim "hiding" what PicoLisp does internally is against the
philosophy of PicoLisp.
The only other way would be to "build" your own floating points by cons-ing the
decimal place to the number.
When i was young, i found turtle graphic a very intriguing toy. I used a
platform called netlogo.
The idea is that you have a turtle on the plain which you move by relative
coordinate changes.
Such a thing is great for drawing diagrams too.
The problem is that i think it is impossible to do a nice implementation of
that, since sin, cos, sqrt, multiplication with 2.321 , all would need to be
implemented in which makes the implementation much less nice than a
implementation in a language which "just" works with float points.
That said:
If you mostly do not need floating points or find a work around that works for
you and them PicoLisp is indeed an option.
If there is one area where PicoLisp is a really nice toy it is:
symbolic-ai/lisp-ai/good-old-fashioned-ai
The idea is that you describe your problem in symbolic term and let it be
solved by search, symbolic transformations and hard coded behavioral rules and
clever heuristics.
The computer could be made to play chess with them, stack simulated boxes or
chat really badly with them. Or something like that.
If you want to go down this route SICP might be a excellent inspiration.
However it is aimed at university students in so far as it builds programs to
calculate a symbolic derivative. If they are not familiar with such concepts
and would like more visual stuff, a nice road to introduce recursion is
L-Systems (they are simple symbolic systems which can be drawn out to look very
plant like,).
These are my initial thoughts if you could tell us your ideas i can give more
detailed feedback.
It might be interesting to arrange a time where people interested in that could
meet in the IRC and discuss some ideas for an hour.
sincerely freemint
Ursprüngliche Nachricht
Von: [email protected]
Gesendet: 13. April 2019 11:41
An: [email protected]
Antworten: [email protected]
Betreff: PicoLisp for 9-11 years' kids
Dear PicoLisp programmers,
I'll be introducing PicoLisp to two young exceptionally bright
sibling children (Ojas, boy age 9 years and Oshin, girl age 11 years, who are
in homeschool) who have no experience of computer science and programming.
PicoLisp being the most advanced computational framework and perfect model
language suits best for this purpose
Migrating from one language to another becomes a tough job later in life. Such
as children knowing Sanskrit/German as their first language will find them easy
than people who learn them later in lives after already speaking English (or
any other language for that matter).
I'm very excited to begin this as it is a radical approach and is extremely
challenging.
I am considering what and how I should start. And at what stage should they be
introduced to C and Assembly?
I want them to get idea of PicoLisp as the language for handling all their day
to day projects that they'll be needing to do in coming days, and later in life.
I also plan to introduce PicoLisp in local communities and schools depending on
my experience with them. You may be aware that proponents of other Lisps such
as http://www.racket-lang.org are putting lot of effort with beginner level,
easy to programme colorful pictures, animations and graphics to provide lively
introduction to young students to introduce their language as first language
early in their lives, even as a tool to learn elementary Math, Science and also
to make beautiful presentations.
Children will find it extremely attractive if they can create something out of
PicoLisp, like diagrams, presentations, Math (using svg library to make
geometric shapes, plot graphs etc).
These are some of my ideas that I'll be trying to implement. Yet I'll also be
needing help of other PicoLisp programmers in this regard.
Active cooperation, reviews, feedback and suggestions are welcome.
Best,
NehalPԔ � &j)m����X��� ��zV�u�.n7�
