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by aston 6725 days ago
Gerry Sussman... Good piece of trivia: In addition to creating the class, he taught the last (ever) offering of 6.001 last term at MIT.

Another piece of trivia: Hal Abelson, the co-creator, was one of the big guys being 6.001's replacement (now in Python).
1 comments
kflasch 6724 days ago
With all of the excitement I see online about SICP and Lisp/Scheme, do you (or anyone else) know why they are transitioning away from the book and Scheme?
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aston 6724 days ago
You may have missed the other excitement online about schools changing their computer science programs to make them more attractive to students. MIT's not really ratcheting down the difficulty, but starting off everyone in Scheme was really off-putting to a number of students.

The new intro classes are in Python, which you could argue has the immediate benefit of being used in the world outside of MIT. They're also now more focused on learning while working towards project-style goals (like building a robot) instead of towards academic goals (like getting Scheme to do OOP).

Personally, I loved 6.001, but I'm the first to admit it was not for everyone, even people who could become great coders.

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jimbokun 6723 days ago
"The new intro classes are in Python, which you could argue has the immediate benefit of being used in the world outside of MIT."

Yep. They can tell incoming freshmen they can use Python when they get a job at Google. Something that was not true of Scheme.

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