[lll-o-lll]

You have been voted down, but this is 100% truth. I’d been a professional software developer for 10 years and programming since a young child when I stumbled across the MIT Scheme open course (this was nearly 10 years ago now). Learning Scheme as an exercise dramatically improved me as a software developer, as it is the near perfect teaching language. The fundamentals of most computer science concepts are so clearly laid out, with no distractions. I wish I’d had the exposure at a younger age!

MIT Scheme is pretty much useless as a practical language, vastly less useful than Python. Python is infinitely more powerful to actually “make things”. But this is not the point of University!

The academic languages are powerful for learning, and it is a huge shame that they are being replaced with “professionally relevant” languages.

[bitwize]

Real software engineering is a drudgery of stitching together other people's libraries and APIs, responding to the product team's "can't we just...?" queries, and alphabetizing your HTML properties. College doesn't prepare you for that. Shiny happy Schemeland doesn't prepare you for that. It's like the old joke about Bill Gates and the beta version of hell.

[freilanzer]

> College doesn't prepare you for that. Shiny happy Schemeland doesn't prepare you for that.

I see no problem with that. That's not what university should be about. They're not supposed to be software dev bootcamps for companies.