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I think that there's a big factor that goes largely unacknowledged. Lots of non-Computer Science students have to take introductory programming. Given the cho

I think that there's a big factor that goes largely unacknowledged. Lots of non-Computer Science students have to take introductory programming. Given the choice between teaching a mechanical engineer something like scheme, which he will in all likelihood never use again, and python, which is a lot more widely useful, the choice is clear. Introductory programming is all about what functions, variables, etc. are. I doubt many intro-level students ever grasped the fact that they were working on more or less the raw AST or the "code as data" thing anyway.

hga 16y ago
BZZT! 6.001 was never a service course and while it was taught the EECS department even stopped teaching their service course due to lack of resources (MIT doesn't let departments get too big for a long time until they're sure they aren't going to suffer a crash like Aero/Astro, which of course turned out to be very wise after the dot.com bust). Other departments taught and still teach their own relevant for their fields programming service courses, and surprise, surprise, the EECS department has started teaching a Python based service course ... although partly because the new 6.01 course doesn't have the time budget for students to learn Python's syntax and other irregularities (you can't take 6.01 without proving you can program in Python, as I recall). ADDED: that said, there are a lot of students outside the EECS department who are very upset they can no longer take 6.001, which in times past quite a few did.