[gumby]

By the way that is one of reasons for using scheme -- there's hardly any syntax, and definitely none of the confusing distinction between statements and expressions. There's not much value to syntax highlighting in such an environment.

Remember: when the course was introduced (ca 1981) few of the freshman had ever used a computer before they arrived at MIT. The first lecture included an second on "how to program in scheme" and after that it was assumed you could do all the assignments. This book has to include a much more complex (and I would imagine to the new programmer, daunting) introduction to dealing with Python.

I feel like the scheme version was a more nuts and bolts class full of practical information while this Python version feels less practical. But that could be a bias on my part.

There are good reasons to switch the instruction to Python (the libraries, mainly) but in exchange something is lost. Engineering is all about dealing with such tradeoffs :-).