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That was different when I learned Lisp. Our CS intro courses were either Scheme + something else or even Common Lisp + Ada. Basically every CS student at the lo
by lispm 5y ago
That was different when I learned Lisp. Our CS intro courses were either Scheme + something else or even Common Lisp + Ada. Basically every CS student at the local university had exposure to either Scheme or Lisp then. There were a bunch of research projects that were mostly using Lisp: advanced chat systems, image processing, planning, diagnosis, route planning, music theory, ...
- Jtsummers 5y agoI'm not sure if that's supposed to be a counterargument or not. I mean, MIT taught SICP for over 20 years with Scheme before dropping it. So it may be true that a majority of MIT trained programmers learned a Lisp in college. But that's not the typical experience across universities, and I doubt it ever was the case that the majority of universities taught the majority of their CS students with a mandatory Lisp course (that is, a course beyond the survey-style course I mentioned before, which seems to be far more common course). Even top universities didn't require it. Georgia Tech, one of the top technical universities in the US, did something like a 2-year stint with a mandatory SICP course before dropping it in favor of Python (IIRC), and had no mandatory Lisp course besides that (though they did have a mandatory Smalltalk course at the time).