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lisp news
thank you for your encouragement. in all fairness to lisp, my financial
difficulties are not lisp's fault (as lmi and symbolics demonstrate), but mine.
i've spent most of my time playing missionary: the lisp conf., the computer faire,
courses at santa clara, and now the summer lisp course. unfortunately, when you
start with zero dollars, and do that kind of  "public service" work, it's only
a matter of time before doom strikes.

i used logo (courtesy of hal) and lisp  in a new course i've been developing at
santa clara --called the art of cs--, and hoped to have a version
of it  blessed this fall for undergrad. humanities people, but the university
went through a re-organization and will "study the matter". the latest
word is a committee will be formed next fall, and parcel out piece of computation
to those departments who think they have expertise in some segment of computing.
total disaster is guaranteed --it's the new sufi story called "butchering the
elephant".

the course is damn fine! it has an "interactive programming lab" which used
(borrowed) apples running logo, to get the people away from the  fortran
basic mentality, and the mod II for lisp (borrowed money for this one --you can
see why tlc loses money?). the course went through:
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computation as evaluation of polynomials a la h.s. algebra since many students had
	no computing background. 

substitution and simplification as evaluation: (first pass at lambda calculus)

functionality as an abstraction of this  scheme

computation as deduction plus control (using numeric, logo, and lisp axiom systems)

lisp/scheme and rep of meta language in object language

abstraction vs represntation and object oriented programming

evaluation a la lisp/scheme (with asides to godel escher bach)

logo to smalltalk: classes and hierarchies, message passing.

ai systems and their potential: what's wrong with weizenbaum

logic and computation

philosophical notions: spengler's math/culture views, georgescu-roegen dialectical
	notions.

the paradoxes and the godel mapping

speakers on: iapx432, notetaker, rubik's cube, zork

books for the course were: pirsig and papert, with weizenbaum required reading
(know your enemy?), select readings from mumford, spengler, hofstatder, 
georgescu-roegen, mumford, and bronowski.
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if you' like to see a more complete outline, ftp hum[1,jra]  on sail's machine.
i'm starting to get this stuff organized into a book, but it needs teaching a few
more times.

so,i'm trying to get support to export this grand plan to  other univerisities
and hopefully to get a polished version together for high schools and kill
the basic/pascal bullshit that goes on now.  this whole scheme is getting out of
reach, what with no money and no school at least for a while.
unfortunately i caught shit from the dean of engineering for "teaching philosophy"
to engineers. it would be amusing if it weren't so serious. the effect is
that i can't teach it in engineering, and with the humanities fussing, that school
is dead too. (i'm not on the faculty at santa clara --teaching is
just another of my quixotic missionary  ventures)... so frustration, runs high
lately.

regarding heath, i don't think the h-89 supports bankswitching (if they can't even
get a reasonable processor-to-display  interface, how could they get that?)
i've been talking to tom dornback at heath about supporting the h-89 tlc
lisp, as well as perhaps getting behind the educational stuff too; his people
are still discussing this. if you could give tlc a boost in that direction
it would be appreciated. i'm actually more concerned in getting support for the
education stuff, since that's more long-range, but it IS non-traditional --not
PI or mindless CAI-- and it scares publishers and computer manufacturers
alike.