| "The interesting bit is that the original author's no longer feel that SICP is the right way to approach programming any more." I think it's more accurate to say that they didn't see a reason to require engineers to learn CS. The class is now completely different. Why python? Not because it's a good programming language, but because there was a library the students could call to control a robot, which was the new goal of the class, not programming. Here's the quote: You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course. So the good thing about the new 6.001 was that it was robot-centered — you had to program a little robot to move around. And robots are not like resistors, behaving according to ideal functions. Wheels slip, the environment changes, etc — you have to build in robustness to the system, in a different way than the one SICP discusses. And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all. https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-f... |