most of the arguments that i heard about moving away from scheme were about how it wasn't worth teaching to people who had never programmed before because it wasn't practical/real world enough or too abstract/LISPy.
i think scheme is still great if you already know some programming because you can appreciate it even more.
If you are MIT/Stanford/UCB and you are worried that you have to teach an industrially useful language because the students need it to get jobs - then you should close down and send them to Pheonix or ITT-Tech
My understanding was that MIT switched to python because in later courses they could actually use it to get things done (robotics, image proc, etc).
While if they taught scheme they had to at the end of the course pretty much say: well that was fun, now we have to teach you something useful to get the rest of the course done.
i meant it wasn't real world/practical enough for other classes, though a certain subset of students only really seemed to care about languages and concepts that they might use in industry.
mit and berkeley had/have the exact same "problem" with scheme (ie they don't/can't use it in any other class except the intro-to-into-cs class). This usually resulted in upped div classes spending a a class or two (basically a week of instruction, or a week of lab) on teaching the basics of the language the course is in. Though when i took the compilers course a few semesters later, the second slide of the entire course was "RTFM", and the professor dryly noted that we would be compiling a subset of python down to x86 assembler using c++, and despite the fact that he didn't expect any of us to know those languages at all, we didn't have the time to spend a lecture or discussion/lab on learning them, so we would have to learn them, on our own time.
I suppose that switching to a language that can be used in many classes is nice, but i don't think the students should have that much trouble switching if the professors supply supplementary material and they (students) understand the intro courses well enough. Plus, I think it's a good idea to get exposed to as many languages as possible, so you learn to think in a way that you can code well in any language.
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>best language to begin programming in The problem is that how many of the new undergrad intake at MIT/UCB are new to programming !
It was a little easier back in the 80s when the new students would only have known BASIC or 6502 assembler
most of the arguments that i heard about moving away from scheme were about how it wasn't worth teaching to people who had never programmed before because it wasn't practical/real world enough or too abstract/LISPy.
i think scheme is still great if you already know some programming because you can appreciate it even more.
If you are MIT/Stanford/UCB and you are worried that you have to teach an industrially useful language because the students need it to get jobs - then you should close down and send them to Pheonix or ITT-Tech
My understanding was that MIT switched to python because in later courses they could actually use it to get things done (robotics, image proc, etc). While if they taught scheme they had to at the end of the course pretty much say: well that was fun, now we have to teach you something useful to get the rest of the course done.
i meant it wasn't real world/practical enough for other classes, though a certain subset of students only really seemed to care about languages and concepts that they might use in industry.
mit and berkeley had/have the exact same "problem" with scheme (ie they don't/can't use it in any other class except the intro-to-into-cs class). This usually resulted in upped div classes spending a a class or two (basically a week of instruction, or a week of lab) on teaching the basics of the language the course is in. Though when i took the compilers course a few semesters later, the second slide of the entire course was "RTFM", and the professor dryly noted that we would be compiling a subset of python down to x86 assembler using c++, and despite the fact that he didn't expect any of us to know those languages at all, we didn't have the time to spend a lecture or discussion/lab on learning them, so we would have to learn them, on our own time.
I suppose that switching to a language that can be used in many classes is nice, but i don't think the students should have that much trouble switching if the professors supply supplementary material and they (students) understand the intro courses well enough. Plus, I think it's a good idea to get exposed to as many languages as possible, so you learn to think in a way that you can code well in any language.