4 ms·

Yeah, that was a pretty common feeling in 6.001, especially among those who hadn't done much programming in high school. At the time, it was taught in Scheme (a

by ericd 7y ago

Yeah, that was a pretty common feeling in 6.001, especially among those who hadn't done much programming in high school. At the time, it was taught in Scheme (a Lisp), which no one I knew taking it had any experience in, so everyone was on sort of equal footing there, at least. And more generally, it seemed to be a pretty common approach there to throw students into the deep end and let them figure it out - people liked to compare the experience to trying to drink from a firehose :-D. I'm not sure if it's optimal for learning the material itself, but it does make jumping into new subjects seem less daunting after you've gone through that a few times.

ghaff 7y ago
Yeah. Course 2. '79. :-) There's probably an expectation these days that students have some degree of exposure to computers. When I took an intro to computing course (FORTRAN) it was pretty much no expectations. But times have changed. And I found 6.001x useful. But then I had a lot of experience with computers even if not programming full-time professionally.
- ericd 7y ago
  Haha so you know the feeling well. Makes sense, guessing not many high schools even had one computer until the Apple II, which I guess would have been a bit after you graduated. Side note, I love that it's possible to take a course like that online for ~free now.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I didn't touch a personal computer until a few years later in a job where we had an Apple II to do some engineering calculations. High school was BASIC using a teletype connected to a local community college--and that was pretty forward looking at the time. I did take a FORTRAN course in college which people would consider very rudimentary today. This was the textbook :-) https://openlibrary.org/works/OL6795090W/A_Fortran_coloring_book https://openlibrary.org/works/OL6795090W/A_Fortran_coloring_... But I didn't really use a computer to speak of (other than as a text editor in grad school) until I was working--and later got into programming as a hobby.
    - ericd 7y ago
      Oh, that's a pretty sweet looking textbook. Reminds me a bit of http://landoflisp.com/ http://landoflisp.com/

by ericd 7y ago

ghaff 7y ago

Yeah. Course 2. '79. :-) There's probably an expectation these days that students have some degree of exposure to computers. When I took an intro to computing course (FORTRAN) it was pretty much no expectations. But times have changed. And I found 6.001x useful. But then I had a lot of experience with computers even if not programming full-time professionally.

ericd 7y ago
Haha so you know the feeling well. Makes sense, guessing not many high schools even had one computer until the Apple II, which I guess would have been a bit after you graduated. Side note, I love that it's possible to take a course like that online for ~free now.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I didn't touch a personal computer until a few years later in a job where we had an Apple II to do some engineering calculations. High school was BASIC using a teletype connected to a local community college--and that was pretty forward looking at the time. I did take a FORTRAN course in college which people would consider very rudimentary today. This was the textbook :-) https://openlibrary.org/works/OL6795090W/A_Fortran_coloring_book https://openlibrary.org/works/OL6795090W/A_Fortran_coloring_... But I didn't really use a computer to speak of (other than as a text editor in grad school) until I was working--and later got into programming as a hobby.
  - ericd 7y ago
    Oh, that's a pretty sweet looking textbook. Reminds me a bit of http://landoflisp.com/ http://landoflisp.com/