Ken,

Are you familiar with Opusmodus? http://opusmodus.com

It’s written in Clozure ccl, and besides providing an incredible array of music manipulation functions and structures, it’s got a beautiful window system. Mac only.

Your idea of using music as a hook to learn Lisp sounds plausible. Good Luck!

- Stoney ———— Stonewall Ballard    stoney@sb.org   http://stoney.sb.org

On Monday, July 6 at 8:15:31 AM, Ken Tilton (kentilton@gmail.com) wrote:

So I got to thinking about creating an approachable pathway to IT careers for anyone really, but in the spirit of today one focused on creating career opportunities for African Americans.

The idea would be a code camp developed around algorithmic generation of music. I know nothing about music theory, except that there is prolly enough there to introduce most if not all fundamental programming concepts.

For those campers that accidentally get hooked on programming itself, which is how many of us ended up in IT careers, away they go!

The idea is to: use music as the hook; defer as long as possible the annoying things about programming (I am looking at you, node.js); part of that ^^^ will be using a powerful language with the parentheses in the right place, prolly ClojureScript since that could run where JS runs; keep programming as the focus, as tempting as the music will be. Sonic Pi comes with all sorts of built-in sound capabilities, but we want to develop those in the code camp; tailor the program to specific musical genres, to maximize the musical hook. I am dropping this here since I know many Common Lispers have a strong musical bent. My questions are: Could we use CL instead? I do think this almost has to be a web app, perhaps even mobile. Hmmm, we could CL-ify CLJS with sufficent clever macrology. What do you think? Can a solid programming fundamentals course be expressed in music theory? Hint: HTTP is not a programming fundamental. If there is any interest, what would be a good place for an ongoing discussion? Google groups? Ideas, comments, suggestions all welcome.

-hk