On 28 July 2011 03:58, Chris Smith
On Wed, 2011-07-27 at 08:27 +0100, Tim Cowlishaw wrote:
(Perhaps wandering slightly O/T, but...) Having done some teaching in similar circumstances before (although not with Haskell), I'd highly recommend this approach. In fact, I'd probably have all the students, regardless of OS install VMWare or VirtualBox, and then distribute a VM image with the Haskell Platform and any other tools they need preinstalled.
Thanks for the advice. I'd like to avoid this, because I want to leave the students with the impression that they have the tools to do their own programming for their own computers when they finish... but at least it's an option that lets Mac users have a working environment of some sort. I've never had any problems with the Windows installation of the HP, and I'm knowledgeable enough to help with Linux, so I'm not worried about those.
I've tutored a Haskell course for the past two years at ANU (it's gone on for longer though) and students generally don't have a problem getting it working. There is a week or two when we have to track down all the OSX stuff (i.e. where is XCode, etc.) though it helps that Alex Mason also tutored it and uses OSX. Then comes the fun part where students are told to set up their editing environment on the uni Linux machines to set tabs to 4 literal spaces, etc. but never seem to remember to do so for their Windows machines... ;-) -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com