Has anyone read the new SICP with Javascript as language of choice?
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Why did someone think it was a good idea to switch to JavaScript?
I think the person who'll get value out of SICP will not have any problem picking up scheme syntax on the fly.
If you study any other related field like math or physics you become accustomed to learning a formal system for the context of a particular problem.
CS students tend to have this weird careerist view where every page just directly help them get a job.
When I did my undergrad CS degree, the fact that scheme was so heavily used was a common complaint they received from students. It just wasn't a marketable skill.
Schools are so desperate to keep up enrollment numbers today that many have capitulated and are giving students what they want instead of what the faculty thinks they need.
If all someone wants is the practical benefits of programming and has no interest in the underlying theory, they shouldn't waste their their time and money on a CS degree. All the practical information is available for free or at very low cost.
But even if that were true and you did take 20+ classes in Scheme, you're still a college educated computer scientist. You can't pick up JavaScript or Python in time for a job interview for an entry level job? They're easy languages to learn. If you survived four years of exclusively being taught with Scheme, they'd be a breeze to pick up.
Is that why they are so bad at adapting to foreign languages and frameworks? Maybe they should go back to the basics.
They wanted a trade school/practical education in something immediately marketable, not a theoretical education.
The reason I remember this is that in my "exit interview" as a senior I mentioned that I appreciated the exposure to these languages and theory and my advisor remarked "we don't hear that very often, the usual feedback is that we don't teach the languages employers want"
Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think there's a better way out there.
I do feel like the value of using Scheme is teaching students early on that syntax doesn't really matter. Those that are actually interested in CS theory will find this enlightening, those that are simply in it because investment banking is so 2007 will churn out.
Engineers rarely do laplace transforms by hand either.
The book is written for 1st year stem undergrads at MIT. So maybe 2nd or 3rd year at state school.
Somewhat understandable considering that student loans put you into indentured servitude unless you have rich parents. Although I still think they're shortsighted. A good CS graduate should understand that programming languages are just syntactic sugar over the underlying concepts and have little trouble translating/picking up the basics of new languages.
Nor is there any good reason to filter people out preemptively. If seeing `foo(x)` instead of `(foo x)` makes the student more receptive to a proper understanding of recursion, that's just fine.
Universities should start their own AI-tutor development programs, in co-operation with others because, only way AI-tutors can become better is by practice practive practice.
So I'n not sure if this is a new viewpoint or not, but it is not only students that need training, it is also teachers who need to be trained more in teaching. AI is all about "training", understanding is about training. Training is the new paradigm for me.