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Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)

(www.wisdomandwonder.com)
284 points borski | 1 comments | 25 Jul 25 16:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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MontyCarloHall ◴[25 Jul 25 17:23 UTC] No.44685710[source]▶
Isn't this just part of the broader trend of CS departments switching away from teaching computer science to teaching computer engineering, which in turn is part of the more general trend of colleges becoming more vocational?

LISP dialects like Scheme are excellent for teaching pure computer science because they are the closest thing to executing lambda calculus expressions. Whereas Python is excellent for teaching applied computer engineering, because it's essentially executable pseudocode for imperative languages, and imperative languages are the most common language a computer engineer encounters in the real world.

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1. wslh ◴[25 Jul 25 17:58 UTC] No.44686154[source]▶
> LISP dialects like Scheme are excellent for teaching pure computer science because they are the closest thing to executing lambda calculus expressions.

Assembler too. For example, Knuth's [M]MIX in The Art of Computer Programming.

That said, this is an introductory programming course, and there are separate courses focused on algorithms (which are not the same as programming). I agree with the article: programming has changed dramatically, while the core of algorithms remains largely unchanged.