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Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)

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284 points borski | 1 comments | 25 Jul 25 16:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | 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. tombert ◴[25 Jul 25 18:32 UTC] No.44686596[source]▶
I just completed the WGU Masters in "Computer Science".

I put the scare quotes around "Computer Science", because outside of a single algorithms and data structure course and a single AI course (which was extremely high level), it was purely engineering stuff. One assignment had me deploying stuff with AWS, I was designing wireframes of potential "apps" I could create, and I had to write one HTTP server.

It was kind of fun and it was nice that I was able to complete it quickly, but it really shouldn't be called "Computer Science", it should be called Software Engineering. There's nothing wrong with software engineering, I just view it as distinct-but-related from CS.