My impression is that dropping Scheme is something that some students have demanded for a long time, maybe even since the beginning. Back when I took 6.001 (in

My impression is that dropping Scheme is something that some students have demanded for a long time, maybe even since the beginning. Back when I took 6.001 (in the 90s) there were certainly fellow Course 6ers who'd rather learn more "practical" languages like C/C++. But the fact is, Sussman could teach all the Scheme one needs for the semseter in one lecture (back then that was R4RS, minus continuations and macros), whereas C would be too low level and C++, well, we'd spend half the term just jumping through syntactic hoops.