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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: 0.273s | 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. aleph_minus_one ◴[25 Jul 25 18:50 UTC] No.44686808[source]▶
> Isn't this just part of the broader trend of CS departments switching away from teaching computer science to teaching computer engineering

Computer engineering is similar as hard as computer science (don't start the discussion which one is harder ;-) ). What CS departments instead switch to is teaching some shallow, applied programming knowledge.