[hga]

Yeah, well, Hal has be diplomatic, he can't authoritatively state that the order came down from on high (perhaps above the department) that Scheme was to be totally purged from the base undergraduate curriculum, which to my knowledge was finished not long ago. That's what's behind his statement "And for random reasons we didn't [do the course in Scheme]."

That said, Hal himself does fully support the change from SICP/6.001 to 6.01 according to my sources.

And you're right that much less EE is required of of pure CS majors (6-3s), but I'm told that very few current students do that major, most do the combined EECS one....

To finish, while I don't have time right now to finish reading/skimming your very interesting interview (you do realize you are by far the best interviewer in our field?) as far as I can tell a lot of the deep stuff taught in SICP/6.001 has also been purged from the base undergraduate curriculum. Kinda reminds me of when the Boy Scouts of the USA changed their system in the '70s so that you could become an Eagle Scout without ever having camped outdoors, started a fire, etc.

(My response to that was to drop out of Boy Scouts; here, as a scientist by inclination who just happens to narrow interests in CS which are fairly EQ with SICP I don't exactly have a dog in this hunt (amusingly, my other big interest in this general field is pure software engineering, the fruits of starting out on an IBM 1130 and realizing there HAD to be a better way to do things :-). Although I do seriously wonder about the de-emphasis of functional programming at some of the top 4 in the multi-core future which is today).