[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).