Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
I've never understood the idea of a 'teaching' programming language. (Modulo examples like Logo and Scratch, which offer much more than a language as part of a wider teaching/computing system.)<p>You spend all this time ramping up on a language, toolchain, library, etc, that you will eventually be unable to leverage beyond a certain point since it is not one used by everyday programmers. The delta in "quality learning" between a teaching language and a non-teaching language would have to be astronomically high, imho, to offset the difference in capability and the opportunity cost of learning an applicable skill to a wider problem set. Something that is just a slightly better Python or a slightly better Clojure for the purpose of illustrating computer science concepts seems like something that you'd be doing a disservice to students to teach, vs the "real thing" which they could carry for the rest of their lives into future projects ad infinitum.