[geofft]

Quite a few, actually, which is why the Scheme class ended up being awful in practice -- you'd get a bimodal distribution of students where some are already familiar with multiple languages (usually more mainstream than Lisp) and some aren't familiar with any, and the class, by necessity, targeted the trough right between those. So it was too fast for the students who never programmed before, and either too slow or too _different_ for the students who had, and served neither group very well.

The new (Python-based) classes handle this a little bit better, from what I hear.

[skrishnamurthi]

The new course is so different in content from the old course that I don't think any pat comparison is meaningful.

At any rate, I went from being a staunch believer in the simplicity of Scheme's syntax to starting to think -- based on lots of observational data, and some preliminary studies (http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mfk-va...) -- that it's too simple (a failure of the "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" maxim).

But MIT's decisions are their own, and potentially peculiar to their specific curricular needs. Pyret was not influenced by them. Brown is proud to teach Racket and does so very successfully. Not every university is a dedicated follower of fashion!

[f7t7ft7]

I've seen an MIT Scheme class video, and it was painfully slow and the guy seemed to explain everything in painstaking detail. I've heard about the bimodal distribution, which I believe I witnessed among fellow students when I was taking classes. But I'm having trouble seeing how Scheme made it any worse or how the class was too fast.

And, Pyret looks like a terrible beginner language! I like PltScheme, but I can't see how anyone would ever want to use that.

[geofft]

Scheme makes it worse, I think, because the way in which you usefully teach Scheme to someone who's never programmed before is different from the way you teach Scheme to someone who already knows C++ or Java or something pretty well.

[skrishnamurthi]

Scheme makes it difficult because it more quickly gets you to teaching difficult ideas. This is an issue about SICP that most people simply never grok. Most courses don't cover a third of the concepts (if that) of SICP in the same amount of time. That's the book, not the language (and the only "fault" of the language is that it lets the book get that far that soon).

[geofft]

Yeah, 6.001 never covered the bulk of what the book covers.

Still, I think Scheme is sufficiently different from mainstream programming languages that it's... like teaching git to a crowd composed half of SVN power users and half of people who have never copied a folder to folder.old in their life. You're balancing teaching "oh, here's how Scheme's different" from "oh, here's how you should have thought about it all along".

In particular I remember the OO system being pretty confusing at first, since my background, from high school, was C++. It makes a lot of sense that Scheme gets out of your way and lets you implement a nifty OO system using just closures, but to someone who expects a language to treat objects as first-class and lambdas not, you're inevitably going to be trying to learn the SICP OO system by comparison to the C++ or Java one.

All that said, I'm not blaming the language at all. I think the quickest fix would have been for MIT to offer either a placement exam or voluntary registration for two classes, one for students who were more-or-less new to programming and one for students with a strong background in something like C++ or Java. Both classes could have used SICP as a text and worked fine.

[skrishnamurthi]

I completely agree. In fact, this sort of two-track approach is what universities like Brown, WPI, etc. now do. Using the same ("weird") language at both levels works fine so long as you separate the crowd. Otherwise, as you very astutely point out, the two groups are asking completely different questions and answering them clearly and consistently is absurdly hard. Too bad MIT didn't think of this (or, presumably, did and rejected it for whatever good reason, that somehow doesn't seem to be applying to other places like Brown).

[marincounty]

I don't know about this class in particular, but the speed of a course does matter. I guess programming is one of the harder courses to teach?