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> However, he did say that starting off with python makes an undergraduate’s initial experiences maximally productive in the current environment. I read this a

by ng12 8y ago

> However, he did say that starting off with python makes an undergraduate’s initial experiences maximally productive in the current environment. I read this as "the parents paying tuition wanted their kids to learn practical skills so they can make money". I learned Scheme as a first language and I will be forever grateful for it.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
If it was any other school than MIT I might agree, but since it’s MIT I doubt that is what the parents are thinking.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
malloryerik 8y ago
Do you think that "How to Design Programs"[1] is the best intro book? Should it be followed by SICP[2]? [1] https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/ [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
- mlazos 8y ago
  I really like htdp, it was used for a bit in my intro class as well, but that curriculum also covered concepts that weren’t from the book. I also have been forever grateful for being taught scheme as my first language. Previous discussion on HN about the second addition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14932552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14932552 EDIT: I feel like it is not all-encompassing but it is a good start. It is definitely unique in the concepts that it covers.
- ng12 8y ago
  I think both are valuable: HTDP is the better intro but SICP scales further. For me an ideal CS101 course would be 3/4ths HTDP with a "best of" SICP tacked on at the end.
DonHopkins 8y ago
If the parents are really that concerned about their kids learning the wrong first programming language in college, then they're not helicoptering enough! Why didn't they teach their kids to program JavaScript or Logo when they were in middle or elementary school? https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu https://bjc.berkeley.edu https://bjc.berkeley.edu
mroche 8y ago
Python was my first, but the computer science course at my university uses Scheme for one of its primary required courses. Really kicked my ass with man-handling recursion and lambdas to no end. Implementing trees (usually binary) gave me a hell of a time. I got so sick of opening DrRacket by the end of the semester. That being said, I did respect the course and the language. I didn’t understand the science part of computer science before starting the minor and that course opened my eyes pretty wide (as did the Data Structures course). It really forces you to think and understand what you were doing, much less poking and prodding (different from trial and error) than what you could do with Python and its libraries. Plus there’s significantly less information out there on it in comparison. I wouldn’t bring parents into it, they have almost no influence on universities unless they are privately funding/donating. But my god those parentheses...
- peatmoss 8y ago
  I learned Python long before touching anything like a lisp, and the closest thing to functional programming that I’d done before touching a lisp was R. All self-taught, usually in the service of something else I wanted to do. I have no formal training in CS. And so my use of Racket is simply as a dilettante. And I LOVE it. I have a lot of imposter syndrome and not really grokking data structures the way CS people can tell you the tradeoffs and implementation details of a B-tree. But, I LOVE coding in Racket when I get the chance. For me, it’s a language where I can jank-hack things together like Python, but having more fun. Wonder if that’s because I never had the fun of Racket sullied by also having to learn data structures and CS fundamentals at the same time?
- ng12 8y ago
  > It really forces you to think and understand what you were doing, much less poking and prodding This is exactly what I look back on so fondly. I already had a lifetime of fiddling with libraries and stack overflow ahead of me, exploring pure computation was a completely eye-opening experience.
curun1r 8y ago
Same here. When I learned programming at UC Berkeley in the 90s, Scheme was the intro language. It was perfect precisely because it was so far from being the kind of language you'd use to engineer large projects. The first day, the professor spent less than half of the period introducing the entire syntax of the language...it's so damn simple. Beyond that, all learning was abstraction, problem solving and CS concepts. It was learning how to take a very limited set of primitives and construct a larger whole. I pity the MIT students that will waste so much of their intro course learning what is a vastly more complex language. There will be so many students that will struggle to learn python-specific topics that are irrelevant to learning the act of coding and may decide that CS and programming just aren't for them. Scheme is such a perfect language for this task because it puts so little between the student and the crucial experimentation phase that can instill a fascination/curiosity with programming. And now MIT students will miss out on that.
- Santosh83 8y ago
  > It was learning how to take a very limited set of primitives and construct a larger whole. By this measure C should be a popular university intro language too, but it is famously unsuitable as a first language, at least according to academics.
  - southerndrift 8y ago
    On the one hand, Scheme has an even smaller set of primitives than C. On the other hand, it's far more difficult to construct the larger whole from those primitives. Additionally, you have all the problems from the compiler when you have to manage libraries, include and object files. With some guidance when students are stuck with the compiler, C is not such a bad language to learn programming, but it doesn't hit the same sweet spot as Scheme.
- JonathanMerklin 8y ago
  > There will be so many students that will struggle to learn python-specific topics that are irrelevant to learning the act of coding Correct me if I'm wrong - I just went to an unrespected state school - but I would think that the MIT admissions filter selects for students who wouldn't particularly struggle with something as small as language idiosyncracies, especially in an introductory course.
karmasimida 8y ago
I learned Python as my first TRUE(explain later) language and I will be forever grateful for it. Now I am a polyglot, jumping through multiple languages all the time, be it Python/Java/Javascript, or occasionally flirtation with some languages that are foreign to my daily routine but necessary to get my job done. I am not quite on board with you claim that Python is chosen for monetary benefits. To be a qualified programmer, there is so much more need to be learnt beyond Python. Python however, is a GREAT choice to overcome the initial fear of writing code in general, because it is more tolerant. My actual first language is C, and before my college I have never done programming before. I have to say, looking back, learning C as my first language without fully understanding the modern computer architecture is a horrible experience: so many questions as to why things is what it is now, so many traps, crazy pointers, cryptic errors, nightmare segmentfault. Programming is just very frustrating experience to me that the time. Of course, later on, it all makes sense, even pointer seems like a great idea(you can't have more freedom than that), just that we need to put great efforts regulating the use of it to prevent irregular behaviors. On the other hand, Python is a tolerant language, yet providing a pretty comprehensive sets of primitives to play and experiment with. Had I started with Python, I might not waste the initial year struggling and questioning myself whether I could program at all.
- southerndrift 8y ago
  Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme.
  - pfalcon 8y ago
    > I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme. I did. Actually, when I found Python (some 20 years ago), I thought - "Here's it - Lisp for real world".
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    I have to agree. Scheme is so much more elegant and so much simpler than Python. People often talk about how simple Python is, but many of them have either no experience with or no appreciation for Scheme. When they do have exposure to Scheme, it tends to be some ancient, primitive dialect like MIT Scheme rather than modern, full-featured scheme like Chicken, or Racket, or Guile -- so they look at Scheme as a toy language. I don't know how often I've heard comments along the lines of Scheme being a fine academic language but impractical for real work. Python does have a little nice lispyness to it, but it's deliberately limited by the language designers, the syntax is lacking and it has many frustrating inconsistencies and gotchas. Programming in Scheme is just so much easier.
sreeramvenkat 8y ago
Scheme is not my first language and I am still greatful for it. I am self learning SICP for past 3 years (after working 15+ years in non-lisp languages). Though still in chapter 2, it has cleared up and simplified my thinking about programming. I no longer consider bottoms up approach to be sin. Understanding new functional language specs becomes a breeze and it 'just clicks'. Though I am yet to understand why Clojure could not implement tail recursion without the 'recur' keyword.
- samatman 8y ago
  This was a limitation of the JVM. I vaguely recall one of the recent updates removed that limitation, but could be wrong about that.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  They could for all cases where recur is presently used. Recur serves to indicate and document that the function is supposed to be tail recursive and will cause an error if this is not proper rather than silently not being optimized and blowing up when fed too large an input.
munificent 8y ago
Counter-point: Everyone is grateful for our formative experiences because those experiences shape our identity, and we're obviously heavily emotionally invested in who we are. But we highly overvalue which formative experiences matter. If I were to get into a time machine, go into your past, remove Scheme and swap in some other language, you'd probably be grateful today for whatever that other language was. It just hit you at the right time, like whatever song was on the radio when you first fell in love. Every step on our path is dear to us because it got us where we are today, but there are many many paths and little reason to want others to follow in our footsteps. If anything, we should discourage that because the world doesn't need another me or you. It's already got those.
- hopler 8y ago
  This is exactly it. Nostalgia is overpowering.

by ng12 8y ago

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

If it was any other school than MIT I might agree, but since it’s MIT I doubt that is what the parents are thinking.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

malloryerik 8y ago

Do you think that "How to Design Programs"[1] is the best intro book? Should it be followed by SICP[2]? [1] https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/ [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

mlazos 8y ago
I really like htdp, it was used for a bit in my intro class as well, but that curriculum also covered concepts that weren’t from the book. I also have been forever grateful for being taught scheme as my first language. Previous discussion on HN about the second addition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14932552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14932552 EDIT: I feel like it is not all-encompassing but it is a good start. It is definitely unique in the concepts that it covers.
ng12 8y ago
I think both are valuable: HTDP is the better intro but SICP scales further. For me an ideal CS101 course would be 3/4ths HTDP with a "best of" SICP tacked on at the end.

DonHopkins 8y ago

If the parents are really that concerned about their kids learning the wrong first programming language in college, then they're not helicoptering enough! Why didn't they teach their kids to program JavaScript or Logo when they were in middle or elementary school? https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu https://bjc.berkeley.edu https://bjc.berkeley.edu

mroche 8y ago

Python was my first, but the computer science course at my university uses Scheme for one of its primary required courses. Really kicked my ass with man-handling recursion and lambdas to no end. Implementing trees (usually binary) gave me a hell of a time. I got so sick of opening DrRacket by the end of the semester. That being said, I did respect the course and the language. I didn’t understand the science part of computer science before starting the minor and that course opened my eyes pretty wide (as did the Data Structures course). It really forces you to think and understand what you were doing, much less poking and prodding (different from trial and error) than what you could do with Python and its libraries. Plus there’s significantly less information out there on it in comparison. I wouldn’t bring parents into it, they have almost no influence on universities unless they are privately funding/donating. But my god those parentheses...

peatmoss 8y ago
I learned Python long before touching anything like a lisp, and the closest thing to functional programming that I’d done before touching a lisp was R. All self-taught, usually in the service of something else I wanted to do. I have no formal training in CS. And so my use of Racket is simply as a dilettante. And I LOVE it. I have a lot of imposter syndrome and not really grokking data structures the way CS people can tell you the tradeoffs and implementation details of a B-tree. But, I LOVE coding in Racket when I get the chance. For me, it’s a language where I can jank-hack things together like Python, but having more fun. Wonder if that’s because I never had the fun of Racket sullied by also having to learn data structures and CS fundamentals at the same time?
ng12 8y ago
> It really forces you to think and understand what you were doing, much less poking and prodding This is exactly what I look back on so fondly. I already had a lifetime of fiddling with libraries and stack overflow ahead of me, exploring pure computation was a completely eye-opening experience.

curun1r 8y ago

Same here. When I learned programming at UC Berkeley in the 90s, Scheme was the intro language. It was perfect precisely because it was so far from being the kind of language you'd use to engineer large projects. The first day, the professor spent less than half of the period introducing the entire syntax of the language...it's so damn simple. Beyond that, all learning was abstraction, problem solving and CS concepts. It was learning how to take a very limited set of primitives and construct a larger whole. I pity the MIT students that will waste so much of their intro course learning what is a vastly more complex language. There will be so many students that will struggle to learn python-specific topics that are irrelevant to learning the act of coding and may decide that CS and programming just aren't for them. Scheme is such a perfect language for this task because it puts so little between the student and the crucial experimentation phase that can instill a fascination/curiosity with programming. And now MIT students will miss out on that.

Santosh83 8y ago
> It was learning how to take a very limited set of primitives and construct a larger whole. By this measure C should be a popular university intro language too, but it is famously unsuitable as a first language, at least according to academics.
- southerndrift 8y ago
  On the one hand, Scheme has an even smaller set of primitives than C. On the other hand, it's far more difficult to construct the larger whole from those primitives. Additionally, you have all the problems from the compiler when you have to manage libraries, include and object files. With some guidance when students are stuck with the compiler, C is not such a bad language to learn programming, but it doesn't hit the same sweet spot as Scheme.
JonathanMerklin 8y ago
> There will be so many students that will struggle to learn python-specific topics that are irrelevant to learning the act of coding Correct me if I'm wrong - I just went to an unrespected state school - but I would think that the MIT admissions filter selects for students who wouldn't particularly struggle with something as small as language idiosyncracies, especially in an introductory course.

karmasimida 8y ago

I learned Python as my first TRUE(explain later) language and I will be forever grateful for it. Now I am a polyglot, jumping through multiple languages all the time, be it Python/Java/Javascript, or occasionally flirtation with some languages that are foreign to my daily routine but necessary to get my job done. I am not quite on board with you claim that Python is chosen for monetary benefits. To be a qualified programmer, there is so much more need to be learnt beyond Python. Python however, is a GREAT choice to overcome the initial fear of writing code in general, because it is more tolerant. My actual first language is C, and before my college I have never done programming before. I have to say, looking back, learning C as my first language without fully understanding the modern computer architecture is a horrible experience: so many questions as to why things is what it is now, so many traps, crazy pointers, cryptic errors, nightmare segmentfault. Programming is just very frustrating experience to me that the time. Of course, later on, it all makes sense, even pointer seems like a great idea(you can't have more freedom than that), just that we need to put great efforts regulating the use of it to prevent irregular behaviors. On the other hand, Python is a tolerant language, yet providing a pretty comprehensive sets of primitives to play and experiment with. Had I started with Python, I might not waste the initial year struggling and questioning myself whether I could program at all.

southerndrift 8y ago
Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme.
- pfalcon 8y ago
  > I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme. I did. Actually, when I found Python (some 20 years ago), I thought - "Here's it - Lisp for real world".
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  I have to agree. Scheme is so much more elegant and so much simpler than Python. People often talk about how simple Python is, but many of them have either no experience with or no appreciation for Scheme. When they do have exposure to Scheme, it tends to be some ancient, primitive dialect like MIT Scheme rather than modern, full-featured scheme like Chicken, or Racket, or Guile -- so they look at Scheme as a toy language. I don't know how often I've heard comments along the lines of Scheme being a fine academic language but impractical for real work. Python does have a little nice lispyness to it, but it's deliberately limited by the language designers, the syntax is lacking and it has many frustrating inconsistencies and gotchas. Programming in Scheme is just so much easier.

sreeramvenkat 8y ago

Scheme is not my first language and I am still greatful for it. I am self learning SICP for past 3 years (after working 15+ years in non-lisp languages). Though still in chapter 2, it has cleared up and simplified my thinking about programming. I no longer consider bottoms up approach to be sin. Understanding new functional language specs becomes a breeze and it 'just clicks'. Though I am yet to understand why Clojure could not implement tail recursion without the 'recur' keyword.

samatman 8y ago
This was a limitation of the JVM. I vaguely recall one of the recent updates removed that limitation, but could be wrong about that.
michaelmrose 8y ago
They could for all cases where recur is presently used. Recur serves to indicate and document that the function is supposed to be tail recursive and will cause an error if this is not proper rather than silently not being optimized and blowing up when fed too large an input.

munificent 8y ago

Counter-point: Everyone is grateful for our formative experiences because those experiences shape our identity, and we're obviously heavily emotionally invested in who we are. But we highly overvalue which formative experiences matter. If I were to get into a time machine, go into your past, remove Scheme and swap in some other language, you'd probably be grateful today for whatever that other language was. It just hit you at the right time, like whatever song was on the radio when you first fell in love. Every step on our path is dear to us because it got us where we are today, but there are many many paths and little reason to want others to follow in our footsteps. If anything, we should discourage that because the world doesn't need another me or you. It's already got those.

hopler 8y ago
This is exactly it. Nostalgia is overpowering.