[timidger]

It's not (just) that python is "easier" to learn than python (which I dispute - lisp is as easy to learn as a first language as any other. Depending on the language it may be a difficult second language though). The world had also changed radically since it was introduced into the curriculum:

"Costanza asked Sussman why MIT had switched away from Scheme for their introductory programming course, 6.001. This was a gem. He said that the reason that happened was because engineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme — it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and that’s all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want. But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. 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...

[aidenn0]

> It's not (just) that python is "easier" to learn than python (which I dispute - lisp is as easy to learn as a first language as any other. Depending on the language it may be a difficult second language though). The world had also changed radically since it was introduced into the curriculum:

A lot of texts will use pseudo-code and it is (from my experience) easier for beginner programmers to see the relation between pseudo-code and Python than for many other languages.

[lproven]

> python is "easier" to learn than python

(?)

[aidenn0]

That was quoted from GP; presumably they meant "easier to learn than scheme"

[lproven]

Aha, ISWYM. Thanks.

[melagonster]

yes, this actually is the most important advantage of python: python can equal to pseudo code. but new function of python reduced this advantage.

[agumonkey]

I'm still surprised Sussman describes the 2000s as a "new" job whereas to me it's just mediocre soil from an unstable industry. Mucking around is not engineering.. it's alchemy.

[dreamcompiler]

The logical culmination is modern ML, where no engineering is involved. "If the thing fails on some case and kills somebody, train it more." This is voodoo, not engineering.

[tjr]

Given Sussman's aversion to mysterious black-box AI, that's an interesting observation. The curriculum change brings everyone one step closer to not really understanding how things work.

Of course, it's often pointed out, "Well, if you write in Scheme (or C or Java or whatever) then you're not writing in assembly language, much less machine language, so you already don't understand everything." There's certainly truth there, but, to me, going from, expertise writing code in a high-level programming language to, gluing together libraries that you kinda-sorta understand, feels like a bigger leap in what you do or do not understand than going from assembly language to Python.

[tigen]

I suppose it depends on what issues we should consider to be introductory. Maybe the older theoretical approach was more fundamental then than it is now. Like, maybe that was effectively more practical given the old hardware performance constraints and likely having more control of the entire program stack.

It's interesting that Sussman kind of lumps together "uncertain software libraries" into the same category as machine control robustness (e.g. hysteresis). I never thought of it that way but I guess in practice it's all just "stuff", those libraries are just another piece of your program's environment like any other.

[agumonkey]

Maybe MIT approaches post 2000 engineering with a solid foundation of analysis that creates both a beautiful creation process and reliable beautiful software artefacts. But what I observe is a never ending stream of partial doc reading, partially out of date, with random attempts until it looks it won't fail it left running for a few minutes.

Ability to deal / reflect with unknowns for engineering is of great value, but so far I've never seen that in office.

[pklausler]

I see this as the distinction between computer programming and software engineering.

[lproven]

> It's not (just) that python is "easier" to learn than python

(?)

[douglaskayama]

He meant "python is easier to learn than scheme/racket".