Week 1 Lecture Notes

  • Class this week will be led by Neda, I (Kris) am away for previously-scheduled university business. We may have a short Zoom session on Monday if people would like to join, I will try to post a link to Blackboard.

  • Neda’s goal is to get you used to the basic workflow of booting up Dr. Racket, writing a tiny Racket program, and then being able to run that program on the command line. She will also demonstrate how this works on an Autograder project.

  • Even though I will not be at class, I still ask that you watch the course videos–it is not much, and they are designed to be helpful. Generally I will lead class in-person, I understand that students will treat the videos as a reference. But at least when you’re starting, I really encourage you to do it at least for this week, especially as I will be gone.

  • I will not have office hours this week, please email me if you would like to meet–office hours will begin next Tuesday.

  • For the first week of the course, you should:

    • If you haven’t used a command-line interface on your machine, you need to get comfortable using one. I recommend PowerShell on Windows (please read a quick tutorial to avoid wasting a lot of time) or iTerm2 (Mac OS). If you use Linux, you should use whatever terminal emulator you are most familiar with.

    • Make sure you have some version of Python 3 installed (type python3 or python and see if anything happens).

    • Make sure you add the racket executable to your path by booting up Dr. Racket and doing Help->Configure Racket for Command line…

    • Next, you should make sure that racket is present in your path by typing racket and making sure you get a shell.

  • You should try practicing this workflow, writing a tiny Racket file like

(displayln "Hello, World!")

and then being able to do

> racket hello.rkt

and see it print the corresponding string.

  • Neda will cover this workflow on Tuesday.