[ggm]

A useful reminder that economics plays as much, if not more import in what is taught and how it is taught, as any pedagogical drive. If attendance drops, universities can pivot. Gotta get the bums on seats.

20 years ago Cisco came shopping in Australia for ee grads who could do microcode. The US degree mills had stopped teaching students how to code an edge case for most jobs, and the router and switch vendor had to find places who still did that.

[so-cal-schemer]

It's interesting that you would name Cisco. They hired Kent Dybvig and acquired Cadence Research Center in 2011 for Chez Scheme[0] — possibly for use in processing IOS configs, testing, and network management. It seems like Chez was the most performant scheme in the day[1] and was proprietary, expensive, and possibly not available to individuals.[2]

There were a number of good free schemes[3], and Chez was open-sourced in 2016, but I wonder how much of Perl, Ruby, and Python's popularity derived from their open licenses.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241107091603/http://community....

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180917033028/https://ecraven.g...

[2]: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/lang/scheme/part2/...

[3]: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/lang/scheme/part2/...

[so-cal-schemer]

The Development of Chez Scheme R. Kent Dybvig

https://web.archive.org/web/20061205234158/https://www.cs.in...

The Scheme Programming Language 4e

https://www.scheme.com/tspl4/