I find Mathematica's Help/Demo/Tutorial pages to be exemplary documentation for new and experienced users. (I'm thinking of what you get from pressing F1 in the desktop app rather than the online Demonstrations website, which is itself vast and cool.) Most topics have many demos where each is actually an editable code buffer followed immediately by the evalauted output. It encourages playing around right in the midst of the explanatory docs. If a student ever breaks an example beyond his repair skills, he can simply reload the page.
>From my experience, Mathematica has the highest success rate of any software tool when it comes to students learning about new functions on their own through the built-in docs. Which is not quite the same as learning new programming techniques on their own...but still important. -----Original Message----- From: Matthias Felleisen [mailto:matth...@ccs.neu.edu] Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2011 8:00 AM To: Racket Dev Subject: [racket-dev] Fwd: ace? Here is a site that comes with demos/shots that are simple and yet interactive and thus impressive. I am wondering whether we could turn our little code snippets into stuff that people can run and possibly even modify and run. We may have to 'cheat' and use WhaleSong in the background to power some of our graphical animated stuff but hey WhaleSong is close enough to our world. Begin forwarded message: > From: Shriram Krishnamurthi <s...@cs.brown.edu> > Date: August 15, 2011 11:09:40 PM EDT > To: Matthias Felleisen <matth...@ccs.neu.edu> > Subject: Re: ace? > > Nope, CodeMirror: > > http://codemirror.net/ > > The creator is a pretty amazing hacker. (And his background is in CL > and Scheme.) _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/dev