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<TITLE>Simply Scheme Acknowledgments</TITLE>
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<CITE>Simply Scheme</CITE> 2/e Copyright (C) 1999 MIT
<H1>Acknowledgments</H1>
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<CITE><A HREF="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/">Brian
Harvey</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/~matt">Matthew
Wright</A><BR>University of California, Berkeley</CITE>
<BR><BR><A HREF="http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262082810">MIT
Press web page for Simply Scheme</A>
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<P>Obviously our greatest debt is to Harold Abelson,
Gerald Jay Sussman, and Julie Sussman. They have
inspired us and taught us, and gave birth to the movement to which we are
minor contributors. Julie carefully read what we thought was the final
draft, made thousands of suggestions, both small and large, improved the
book enormously, and set us back two months. Hal encouraged us, read early
drafts, and also made this a better book than we could have created on our
own.
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Mike Clancy, Ed Dubinsky, Dan Friedman, and
Tessa Harvey also read drafts and made detailed and very helpful
suggestions for improvement. Mike contributed many exercises.
(We didn't take their advice about everything, though, so they get none of
the blame for anything you don't like here.)
<P>Terry Ehling and everyone at the MIT Press have given this
project the benefit of their enthusiasm and their technical support. We're
happy to be working with them.
<P>The Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley,
allowed us to teach a special section of the CS 3 course using the first
draft of this book. The book now in your hands is much better because of
that experience. We thank Annika Rogers, our teaching assistant
in the course, and also the thirty students who served not merely as guinea
pigs but as collaborators in pinning down the weak points in our
explanations.
<P>Some of the ideas in this book, especially the different approaches to
recursion, are taken from Brian's earlier Logo-based
textbook.<SUP>*</SUP>
Many of our explanatory metaphors, especially the "little people" model,
were invented by members of the Logo community. We also took the word and
sentence data types from Logo. Although this book doesn't use Logo itself,
we tried to write it in the Logo spirit.
<P><SMALL><BLOCKQUOTE><SMALL><SUP>*</SUP><EM>Computer Science Logo Style, volume 1:
Intermediate Programming,</EM> MIT Press, 1985.</SMALL></BLOCKQUOTE></SMALL>
<P>We wrote much of this book during the summer of 1992, while we were on the
faculty of the Institute for Secondary Mathematics and Computer Science
Education, an inservice teacher training program at Kent State University.
Several of our IFSMACSE colleagues contributed to our ideas both about
computer science and about teaching; we are especially indebted to
Ed Dubinsky and Uri Leron.
<P>We stole the idea of a "pitfalls" section at the end of each chapter from
Dave Patterson and John Hennessy.
<P>We stole some of the ideas for illustrations from Douglas
Hofstadter's wonderful <EM>Godel, Escher, Bach.</EM>
<P>David Zabel helped with the preparation of the program diskettes,
especially with compiling SCM for the PC.
<P>We conclude this list with an acknowledgment of each other. Because of the
difference in our ages, it may occur to some readers to suspect that we
contributed unequally to this book--either that Matt did all the work and
Brian just lent his name and status to impress publishers, or that Brian had
all the ideas and Matt did the typing. Neither of these is true. Almost
everything in the book was written with both of us in front of the computer,
arguing out every paragraph. When we did split up to write some sections
separately, each of us read and criticized the other's work. (We're a
little surprised that we still like each other, after all the arguments!)
Luckily we both like the Beatles,
Chinese food, and ice cream, so we had a common ground for
programming examples. But when you see an example about
Bill Frisell, you can be pretty sure it's Matt's writing, and when
the example is about Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich, it's probably
Brian's.
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