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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: 0.212s | 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. wolpoli ◴[25 Jul 25 20:46 UTC] No.44688239[source]▶
I took Scheme for my second programming course, after C++. I think Scheme is simpler to understand. It also allowed students to explore various concepts that weren't available in C++. I enjoy the course.

But since I never took compiler theories and other courses on programming language, I never bumped into many of those concepts again except for those where modern languages adopted the same feature, and I ended up having to relearn them anyway. Hence, I would also argue that these days, most students would have been better served starting with a practical language.