Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)

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.

Lambda Calculus is one of those things that look good on paper as a theory construct but in practice it's not a great abstraction.

And honestly you could go your whole career without touching it, maybe only for the naming of an anonymous function.

Boolean logic, graphs, FSMs, set theory, mathematical proofs, pretty much all user here or there. Lambda calculus? Unless you're one of those Haskell fans, meh.