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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: 0.203s | 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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SoftTalker ◴[25 Jul 25 17:31 UTC] No.44685819[source]▶
Yes. One of the biggest complaints that computer science departments used to get from students is that they weren't learning any languages that employers are using.
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1. zer0zzz ◴[25 Jul 25 18:54 UTC] No.44686865[source]▶
I always found scheme to be a clean slate where no one’s high school experience benefited them in the first year.

My program did Java for the second course, which was very popular in industry and I loathed it.

I do think Python is not so bad to standardize on because it’s stood the test of time and is one of the most popular ways to write code for many disciplines and has applications outside of computer science so it helps everyone that takes the cs requirement even if they aren’t a cs major.

What im saying is Python can even serve as a better version of spreadsheets for folks that aren’t cs.