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Isn't this just part of the broader trend of CS departments switching away from teaching computer science to teaching computer engineering, which in turn is par

Isn't this just part of the broader trend of CS departments switching away from teaching computer science to teaching computer engineering, which in turn is part of the more general trend of colleges becoming more vocational? LISP dialects like Scheme are excellent for teaching pure computer science because they are the closest thing to executing lambda calculus expressions. Whereas Python is excellent for teaching applied computer engineering, because it's essentially executable pseudocode for imperative languages, and imperative languages are the most common language a computer engineer encounters in the real world.

SoftTalker 1y ago
Yes. One of the biggest complaints that computer science departments used to get from students is that they weren't learning any languages that employers are using.
- cess11 1y ago
  I'm not so sure someone who's good with Scheme will be bad with Python or Java. On the contrary, I suspect that such a person is likely to be better suited to build software in either of the latter two. I also suspect that Python is not a particularly good first language for someone who aims for a professional career building software.
  - masklinn 1y ago
    > I'm not so sure someone who's good with Scheme will be bad with Python or Java. The problem likely has always been the companies / HR rather than the students. > I also suspect that Python is not a particularly good first language for someone who aims for a professional career building software. It's not a particularly bad one either, certainly better than Java. IIRC a secondary benefit is that it allows overlap between some of the basic CS, and the CS/CE courses for non CS track students
  - Jtsummers 1y ago
    > I'm not so sure someone who's good with Scheme will be bad with Python or Java. They won't be. But students don't understand that, they want to learn marketable skills and are 18 years old. They haven't figured out that if your skills transcend language choice you will be more marketable even if it means you have to spend a few weeks learning a new language for a new job. They lack maturity, which isn't surprising given their age and experience, and so they complain.
  - icedchai 1y ago
    When I went to university in the 90's, Scheme was used in a couple of early courses. I had already learned C and Java on my own, but greatly enjoyed how Scheme made me think about problems differently. (I didn't learn Python until much later when I was out of school.) As long as students are exposed to multiple languages, I think starting w/Python is fine. Every language has its issues.
- ok123456 1y ago
  There were plenty of less rarefied CS departments that were concerned about this, and they taught C, C++, or Java in their introductory classes. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's your first language, not your last.
  - olddustytrail 1y ago
    How many people do you know who are monolingual?
    - ok123456 1y ago
      Only knowing the language you were required to know to pass a bunch of tests when you were 18 is a negative signal. If someone is interviewing and they only have Java listed, and their school is known for teaching Java for their introductory classes. They're probably not that strong of a programmer.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Human languages and programming languages are not comparable. You will need a lot more effort to become fluent in a second human language than in second programming language. Even if the human language is Esperanto (designed to be really easy for speakers of European languages), and the programming language is C++ (perhaps the most inconsistencies and foot guns) the programming language will need a lot less effort to learn to a high level.
      - exe34 1y ago
        Multiple computer languages are probably more like learning vocabulary in different domains of life and learning to write for different media.
      - olddustytrail 1y ago
        They're not directly comparable because humans have an inbuilt ability to learn human languages. The vast majority of people on the planet know more than one human language and know zero computer languages. It's literally the opposite of what you're claiming.
- 90s_dev 1y ago
  To be fair, if you learn computer science well enough to thoroughly understand Scheme, I don't think it'll take more than a few weeks during the summer to learn Python.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    I disagree. You can learn the language itself pretty quickly. Finding your way through the expansive standard library will take longer. Getting a good handle on the package ecosystem is a lifetime learning project.
    - acuozzo 1y ago
      Knowing your way around the ecosystem of one programming language does not build up the intuition necessary for identifying O(n²) (or worse!) algorithms and choosing/writing O(log(n)) (or better!) ones instead. Computer Science has little to do with science, but what it teaches you is certainly closer to science than just building a huge mental index for a bunch of work done by other people. There's certainly value in that skill, but it has no place in a Computer Science curriculum. This would be like taking Astrophysics students and telling them to study the details of all of the different kinds of telescopes they can buy.
      - kstrauser 1y ago
        That's not really what we were talking about here. The context was that compsci students want to learn marketable skills, and the claim was that if the student had learned Scheme in class, they could quickly pick up Python. And that's true, for the language itself. But knowing only the language, like never importing code you hadn't written yourself, doesn't go far along the road to marketability. I'm not arguing that compsci should be job training, not at all. My disagreement is solely with this specific claim. But FWIW, while I understand your analogy, an astrophysics department that didn't tell the students that there are these things called telescopes, and here's why you might use one over the other for various situations, and that they're how you're going to get the observation data you'll test your theories against, would be doing a disservice.
- nextos 1y ago
  I always found this to be a shortsighted complaint. Getting exposed to languages where computation models are clear gives you an excellent background to switch to the language du jour and become a master. Going through e.g. HtDP or CTM makes it easy to transition to Python and write excellent code, whereas traversing the opposite path is going to be tough.
  - delecti 1y ago
    I agree, but those don't need to be the languages you use in all classes. I learned a few assembly and academic languages (MIPS and LISP) in classes for those two topics, and it was absolutely useful to learn how to think in terms of those languages. The vast majority of our classes were Java though, and that's also been the vast majority of what I've done since graduation. (I think my school has since moved to Python as well) So I graduated with that really helpful knowledge about why modern languages work how they do, but also a lot of practical experience of actually using those modern languages too.
  - ajkjk 1y ago
    even better is learning the languages you want to learn why are you paying a school to teach you something adjacent to what you want to learn so you can learn the thing you need yourself?
    - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > why are you paying a school to teach you something adjacent to what you want to learn so you can learn the thing you need yourself? Because some topics are easy to learn by yourself, and some are not, so the latter ones are better learned in a college setting.
      - kelipso 1y ago
        Learning a language definitely belongs in the first category. Learning computer science goes in the latter category.
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
- zer0zzz 1y ago
  I always found scheme to be a clean slate where no one’s high school experience benefited them in the first year. My program did Java for the second course, which was very popular in industry and I loathed it. I do think Python is not so bad to standardize on because it’s stood the test of time and is one of the most popular ways to write code for many disciplines and has applications outside of computer science so it helps everyone that takes the cs requirement even if they aren’t a cs major. What im saying is Python can even serve as a better version of spreadsheets for folks that aren’t cs.
- djoldman 1y ago
  I think someone who learns computer science well from the theoretical side can pick up a new language quickly. After all, if it's turing complete, it's turing complete, they're all the same at that level. Problems creep in when the person doesn't learn CS well, chooses an approach that is deeply reliant on overly complex/opaque libraries without good documentation, or the like.
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  That's kind of a useless argument. Universities often also don't teach people any web development. In many cases a graduating student has never worked on any real project. If the university's idea is, that the student can learn those things in their free time, then surely asking someone to learn a little bit of Python or another language is not too big an ask either. So which one is it? Learn that stuff at home on your own time, or university should teach it, because it is needed on the job? Then what other things are they not teaching that is used on the job?
  - billy99k 1y ago
    When I was in college, we had our base software development courses and could choose web development as an elective. Our class taught .NET.
- toolslive 1y ago
  indeed. The problem with being expose do to something so much more clean/elegant/powerful than the languages employers are using is that you no longer want to do it. It's like having tasted good whisky. You no longer think Jack's acceptable. These days, employers more or less get what they wanted. We're doomed.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
NewsaHackO 1y ago
Executable pseudocode is an oxymoron.
- unethical_ban 1y ago
  "essentially", come now. The point is that python's syntax reads a lot more plainly and logically for learning than something like Java.
  - NewsaHackO 1y ago
    I am confused, what is the relevance of the word essentially?
    - unethical_ban 1y ago
      Do you agree or disagree that Python is more readable/closer to pseudocode than say Java or C++? Less syntactic sugar, no need to define namespaces/classes, more intuitive for declarations, etc.
      - NewsaHackO 1y ago
        Would you consider essentially dry water to be semantically correct phrase?
        unethical_ban 1y ago
        I understood the meaning of their phrase and explained it. You assert that the original phrase is incomprehensible and meaningless. We see things differently.
- ted_dunning 1y ago
  And so is Python in many ways. The shoe fits.
  - gjm11 1y ago
souldzin 1y ago
Are functional languages more computer science than imperative languages?
- remexre 1y ago
  Formal reasoning about functional programs in terms of their (denotational) semantics is normal in a functional programming class (e.g. it's about a quarter of our mandatory-for-undergrads FP course). Formal reasoning about imperative programs in terms of their (e.g. axiomatic) semantics is only in a grad-level course, and the programs you can reason about are really, really limited compared to the functional ones. (The last time I TA'd the FP class, one of the homeworks involved proving a simple compiler correct. When I took the grad course, I think the most complicated program we proved correct was selection sort.) I think "reasoning about programs" is more computer-science than "writing programs," and choosing an imperative language signals that you're not emphasizing the former.
- dehrmann 1y ago
  It's one way of modelling the broad notion an algorithm, but it isn't the only one, and it's odd to treat it as the one true expression of computer science when essentially all modern computing follows a different model.
raverbashing 1y ago
Lambda Calculus is one of those things that look good on paper as a theory construct but in practice it's not a great abstraction. And honestly you could go your whole career without touching it, maybe only for the naming of an anonymous function. Boolean logic, graphs, FSMs, set theory, mathematical proofs, pretty much all user here or there. Lambda calculus? Unless you're one of those Haskell fans, meh.
- Koshkin 1y ago
  > Haskell https://book.realworldhaskell.org/ https://book.realworldhaskell.org/
kec 1y ago
Computer Engineering is its own discipline, typically lumped with Electrical Engineering, which is more about system architecture and design and only touches on programming at a low level such as device firmware. What I think you're really lamenting is the devolution of CS education to vocational programming.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  I think he meant software engineering.
  - leoc 1y ago
    “Software Engineering” tends to be about project management: schedules and organisation, estimation, defect rates and so on. For vocational training on existing IT systems (including some coding), which I assume is more what the course focused on, then “Management Information Systems” or “Information Technology” would be the more traditional names IIUC.
wslh 1y ago
> LISP dialects like Scheme are excellent for teaching pure computer science because they are the closest thing to executing lambda calculus expressions. Assembler too. For example, Knuth's [M]MIX in The Art of Computer Programming. That said, this is an introductory programming course, and there are separate courses focused on algorithms (which are not the same as programming). I agree with the article: programming has changed dramatically, while the core of algorithms remains largely unchanged.
dartharva 1y ago
> the more general trend of colleges becoming more vocational Things would be so much better if this were actually true..
darksaints 1y ago
Colleges becoming more vocational is a consequence of colleges becoming more expensive for students. If you are paying all of that money for college, you better get a good job out of it. I don't see that as a bad thing necessarily, but it would definitely be nice if we had better paths for those who want to end up in research. I'd argue that SML (or derivative thereof) would make for a better teaching language, for both the lambda calculus aspect and the type theory aspect.
- Jtsummers 1y ago
  > I'd argue that SML (or derivative thereof) would make for a better teaching language, for both the lambda calculus aspect and the type theory aspect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098598 A critique along those lines which suggests KRC and Miranda which are in the same vein as SML.
- throwaway328 1y ago
  I suspect you might be observing two correlates and picking one as the cause of the other in a way that is ahistorical. Specifically, it seems to me that colleges becoming more vocational and colleges becoming more expensive are both natural outcomes of the neoliberalisation of all things. I am aware that some students now rationalise their educational investments with the logic you describe above, but I think it's a post-hoc rationalisation. You can get a good job without going to college, and you can get a good education without paying a gazillion bucks. A side point, but calling it "vocational" seems a bit euphemistic too. Learning carpentry is a vocation. Getting a business degree is not equivalent to learning carpentry. I might say colleges have become commercialised, rather.
- marsten 1y ago
  I attribute the curriculum shift to something slightly different, which is the changing perception of CS as a career. When I was in college in the late 1980s, CS was not perceived as the moneymaking career it is today. Accordingly the kids who went into CS were typically the nerds and hackers who truly loved the field. Many kids now perceive CS as a safe, lucrative career option akin to becoming a doctor or lawyer. It attracts many students who are smart but perhaps not as intrinsically excited about the field. The universities adjusted their curricula to what these students care about: Less beautiful theory, and more practical training. A similar thing happened in statistics. At one time it was hardcore stats nerds. Now "data science" has brought a ton more people into the field and the teaching methods have changed dramatically.
Karrot_Kream 1y ago
When this kind of switch was happening in CS departments, as a graduate student I was part of a "movement" that advocated for switching away from things like Scheme to Python for introductory classes in my elite CS institution. (We focused on other things as well such as more interdisciplinary research, which was where I was more passionate, but that's a separate matter.) My reasoning at the time in this order was: 1. Widely used tools and practices offer a flywheel of usefulness that can help motivate undergrads to learn about computation. Once you learn Scheme, well now you've learned Scheme. But at the time if you had learned Python you could then use something like Python's system and socket APIs to play around with the lab or personal Linux systems. On the web side, there was web.py or Flask (haha this was the late 2000s/early 2010s) to motivate yourself to keep going. The student could spend their summer building apps and tools so that they appreciate computation for more than just its "aesthetic" beauty. This was a time when CS wasn't all that prestigious on its own and salaries weren't as high as they are now, so many folks who banged their head against Scheme or MMIX or LC3 would just churn to the EE or MechE departments. 2. As a grad student it was almost trivial to set an exam paper that could weed out most of the class. This was especially trivial at the introductory class level where Scheme would be taught. If the concern was rigor it was very simple to maintain the rigor in other ways. 3. For better or for worse many undergrads had no intent of going to grad school, and many of the undergrads taking our classes weren't even students of computer science. They were electrical engineers or industrial engineers who wanted to learn enough programming to automate things in their field but were more interested in their actual areas of concentration. In the years since my thinking around this evolved, but I still share the same conviction I did then. Probably moreso given the sheer ubiquity of Python now.
- em-bee 1y ago
  help motivate undergrads to learn about computation. Once you learn Scheme, well now you've learned Scheme. But at the time if you had learned Python you could then use something like Python's system and socket APIs to play around with the lab or personal Linux systems that's a good point actually. i had scheme, modula and others i don't remember in my undergrad classes. i remember almost nothing from that time. but at the same time i met some students running an LPmud, where i learned LPC, and then i discovered roxen and pike (which is based on LPC) which i used in all my volunteer and fun programming work. in other words all my motivation for learning stuff came from the outside.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
"Computer engineering" isn't vocational. It's an entire sub-specialty involving hardware theory and application. "Programming" is the vocational shift which was traditionally outside the purview of academic curricula. You're not engineering anything if you don't have a repeatable process that will deliver expected results. Programming alone doesn't meet that bar.
tombert 1y ago
I just completed the WGU Masters in "Computer Science". I put the scare quotes around "Computer Science", because outside of a single algorithms and data structure course and a single AI course (which was extremely high level), it was purely engineering stuff. One assignment had me deploying stuff with AWS, I was designing wireframes of potential "apps" I could create, and I had to write one HTTP server. It was kind of fun and it was nice that I was able to complete it quickly, but it really shouldn't be called "Computer Science", it should be called Software Engineering. There's nothing wrong with software engineering, I just view it as distinct-but-related from CS.
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> Isn't this just part of the broader trend of CS departments switching away from teaching computer science to teaching computer engineering Computer engineering is similar as hard as computer science (don't start the discussion which one is harder ;-) ). What CS departments instead switch to is teaching some shallow, applied programming knowledge.
ajkjk 1y ago
I think it's absurd to start with Scheme. A graduate who knows Python but not Scheme has a hope of doing something with computer science. A graduate who knows Scheme but not Python is basically unable to use computers at a technical level. The only choices here are "Python" or "Scheme + Python". (Yes, of course, they could teach themselves Python at that point---but if we're talking about things that people can teach themselves, they can teach themselves the whole curriculum and both languages; the debate here is over what the university should hold them accountable to learn).
- Jtsummers 1y ago
  > I think it's absurd to start with Scheme. A graduate who knows Python but not Scheme has a hope of doing something with computer science. A graduate who knows Scheme but not Python is basically unable to use computers at a technical level. What language you start with and what languages you know on graduating are going to be different. It takes 4 years to get through most bachelors programs (without taking summer terms, very high course loads, or coming in with a bunch of transfer credits). It's no more absurd to start with Scheme than to start with Python when there are at least 7 semesters remaining to learn more. If a graduate only knows what they learned in CS 1, they aren't a CS graduate even if they got that slip of paper. They conned the school, or the school conned them.
- Hammershaft 1y ago
  It's easier to explore deeper concepts learning with scheme because the language is such a simple and introspective encapsulation of generalized computer science concepts.
- wat10000 1y ago
  I and about a million other programmers started with BASIC. My second language was Pascal. I don’t imagine I’d be very employable if that’s all I knew, but it turns out that you can learn many programming languages and it’s not all that much effort after the first two or three. There’s no reason to think the language you start with should be one that you could get paid to use. And no, I wouldn’t recommend starting with BASIC. But starting with Scheme seems like a great choice.
pk455 1y ago
> most common language a computer engineer Depends on your definition of a computer engineer. Dealing with strings in Python vs. dealing with character arrays in C is a world of a difference. The decision to use Python feels like a solid compromise between giving the students a stair step to applied computer science work, while stripping away the cruft and language-specifics that would distract from implementing the more theoretical learning material
- Kwpolska 1y ago
  Depends on which part of the theory you care about. Lists in Python are a magic structure that can grow and shrink at will. That's a bit too high level to be useful for learning the theory.
williamcotton 1y ago
I think you mean software engineering. Computer engineering is computing hardware, CPUs, etc.
wolpoli 1y ago
I took Scheme for my second programming course, after C++. I think Scheme is simpler to understand. It also allowed students to explore various concepts that weren't available in C++. I enjoy the course. But since I never took compiler theories and other courses on programming language, I never bumped into many of those concepts again except for those where modern languages adopted the same feature, and I ended up having to relearn them anyway. Hence, I would also argue that these days, most students would have been better served starting with a practical language.
zozbot234 1y ago
> Whereas Python is excellent for teaching applied computer engineering, because it's essentially executable pseudocode for imperative languages It's not that simple, Python is a fiddly, complex, high-level language that has accreted features in a very ad-hoc way. This makes it very hard to teach and learn in a way that's expected to pay even the most cursory attention to actual rigor. You could probably define a Baby Python subset of the language that's just as simple and rigorously defined as Scheme and teach that, but this isn't how the new MIT intro courses have been designed.
- gowld 1y ago
  Python was invented as a language for newbies. It's come a long way! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_1 > During Van Rossum's stay at CNRI, he launched the Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E) initiative, intending to make programming more accessible to more people, with a basic "literacy" in programming languages, similar to the basic English literacy and mathematics skills required by most employers. Python served a central role in this: because of its focus on clean syntax, it was already suitable, and CP4E's goals bore similarities to its predecessor, ABC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language) > It is intended for teaching or prototyping
  - bmitc 1y ago
    It was an attempt but a bad one.
  - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
    > "Python was invented as a language for newbies." Yeah, but so was BASIC. If Edsger Dijkstra were alive today to write an updated edition of his infamous "How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt?" essay, he'd probably just just reuse his quip for BASIC for Python.
- leoc 1y ago
  > You could probably define a Baby Python subset of the language that's just as simple and rigorously defined as Scheme and teach that Pyret https://pyret.org/ https://pyret.org/ started out with more or less that ambition I think. IIRC its author had previously tried to work with Python (and its dev team) but gave up.
zahlman 1y ago
> Whereas Python is excellent for teaching applied computer engineering, because it's essentially executable pseudocode for imperative languages Python offers quite good multi-paradigm support and could absolutely be used to explore many key concepts from SICP (granted, nothing is as meta-programmable as the Lisp family, since AST manipulation in other languages requires additional steps to actually obtain an AST). In particular, since Python's object model includes functions, higher-order functions are possible (and indeed, `map` is a builtin, and `reduce` is in the standard library after previous demotion from builtin status). Nowadays of course it's fashionable to litter the code with manifest type hints, which are a distraction to that sort of pedagogy. However, they are still entirely optional, have zero-to-generally-irrelevant effect at runtime, and can simply be disregarded.

SoftTalker 1y ago

Yes. One of the biggest complaints that computer science departments used to get from students is that they weren't learning any languages that employers are using.

cess11 1y ago
I'm not so sure someone who's good with Scheme will be bad with Python or Java. On the contrary, I suspect that such a person is likely to be better suited to build software in either of the latter two. I also suspect that Python is not a particularly good first language for someone who aims for a professional career building software.
- masklinn 1y ago
  > I'm not so sure someone who's good with Scheme will be bad with Python or Java. The problem likely has always been the companies / HR rather than the students. > I also suspect that Python is not a particularly good first language for someone who aims for a professional career building software. It's not a particularly bad one either, certainly better than Java. IIRC a secondary benefit is that it allows overlap between some of the basic CS, and the CS/CE courses for non CS track students
- Jtsummers 1y ago
  > I'm not so sure someone who's good with Scheme will be bad with Python or Java. They won't be. But students don't understand that, they want to learn marketable skills and are 18 years old. They haven't figured out that if your skills transcend language choice you will be more marketable even if it means you have to spend a few weeks learning a new language for a new job. They lack maturity, which isn't surprising given their age and experience, and so they complain.
- icedchai 1y ago
  When I went to university in the 90's, Scheme was used in a couple of early courses. I had already learned C and Java on my own, but greatly enjoyed how Scheme made me think about problems differently. (I didn't learn Python until much later when I was out of school.) As long as students are exposed to multiple languages, I think starting w/Python is fine. Every language has its issues.
ok123456 1y ago
There were plenty of less rarefied CS departments that were concerned about this, and they taught C, C++, or Java in their introductory classes. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's your first language, not your last.
- olddustytrail 1y ago
  How many people do you know who are monolingual?
  - ok123456 1y ago
    Only knowing the language you were required to know to pass a bunch of tests when you were 18 is a negative signal. If someone is interviewing and they only have Java listed, and their school is known for teaching Java for their introductory classes. They're probably not that strong of a programmer.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Human languages and programming languages are not comparable. You will need a lot more effort to become fluent in a second human language than in second programming language. Even if the human language is Esperanto (designed to be really easy for speakers of European languages), and the programming language is C++ (perhaps the most inconsistencies and foot guns) the programming language will need a lot less effort to learn to a high level.
    - exe34 1y ago
      Multiple computer languages are probably more like learning vocabulary in different domains of life and learning to write for different media.
    - olddustytrail 1y ago
      They're not directly comparable because humans have an inbuilt ability to learn human languages. The vast majority of people on the planet know more than one human language and know zero computer languages. It's literally the opposite of what you're claiming.
90s_dev 1y ago
To be fair, if you learn computer science well enough to thoroughly understand Scheme, I don't think it'll take more than a few weeks during the summer to learn Python.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  I disagree. You can learn the language itself pretty quickly. Finding your way through the expansive standard library will take longer. Getting a good handle on the package ecosystem is a lifetime learning project.
  - acuozzo 1y ago
    Knowing your way around the ecosystem of one programming language does not build up the intuition necessary for identifying O(n²) (or worse!) algorithms and choosing/writing O(log(n)) (or better!) ones instead. Computer Science has little to do with science, but what it teaches you is certainly closer to science than just building a huge mental index for a bunch of work done by other people. There's certainly value in that skill, but it has no place in a Computer Science curriculum. This would be like taking Astrophysics students and telling them to study the details of all of the different kinds of telescopes they can buy.
    - kstrauser 1y ago
      That's not really what we were talking about here. The context was that compsci students want to learn marketable skills, and the claim was that if the student had learned Scheme in class, they could quickly pick up Python. And that's true, for the language itself. But knowing only the language, like never importing code you hadn't written yourself, doesn't go far along the road to marketability. I'm not arguing that compsci should be job training, not at all. My disagreement is solely with this specific claim. But FWIW, while I understand your analogy, an astrophysics department that didn't tell the students that there are these things called telescopes, and here's why you might use one over the other for various situations, and that they're how you're going to get the observation data you'll test your theories against, would be doing a disservice.
nextos 1y ago
I always found this to be a shortsighted complaint. Getting exposed to languages where computation models are clear gives you an excellent background to switch to the language du jour and become a master. Going through e.g. HtDP or CTM makes it easy to transition to Python and write excellent code, whereas traversing the opposite path is going to be tough.
- delecti 1y ago
  I agree, but those don't need to be the languages you use in all classes. I learned a few assembly and academic languages (MIPS and LISP) in classes for those two topics, and it was absolutely useful to learn how to think in terms of those languages. The vast majority of our classes were Java though, and that's also been the vast majority of what I've done since graduation. (I think my school has since moved to Python as well) So I graduated with that really helpful knowledge about why modern languages work how they do, but also a lot of practical experience of actually using those modern languages too.
- ajkjk 1y ago
  even better is learning the languages you want to learn why are you paying a school to teach you something adjacent to what you want to learn so you can learn the thing you need yourself?
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > why are you paying a school to teach you something adjacent to what you want to learn so you can learn the thing you need yourself? Because some topics are easy to learn by yourself, and some are not, so the latter ones are better learned in a college setting.
    - kelipso 1y ago
      Learning a language definitely belongs in the first category. Learning computer science goes in the latter category.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
zer0zzz 1y ago
I always found scheme to be a clean slate where no one’s high school experience benefited them in the first year. My program did Java for the second course, which was very popular in industry and I loathed it. I do think Python is not so bad to standardize on because it’s stood the test of time and is one of the most popular ways to write code for many disciplines and has applications outside of computer science so it helps everyone that takes the cs requirement even if they aren’t a cs major. What im saying is Python can even serve as a better version of spreadsheets for folks that aren’t cs.
djoldman 1y ago
I think someone who learns computer science well from the theoretical side can pick up a new language quickly. After all, if it's turing complete, it's turing complete, they're all the same at that level. Problems creep in when the person doesn't learn CS well, chooses an approach that is deeply reliant on overly complex/opaque libraries without good documentation, or the like.
zelphirkalt 1y ago
That's kind of a useless argument. Universities often also don't teach people any web development. In many cases a graduating student has never worked on any real project. If the university's idea is, that the student can learn those things in their free time, then surely asking someone to learn a little bit of Python or another language is not too big an ask either. So which one is it? Learn that stuff at home on your own time, or university should teach it, because it is needed on the job? Then what other things are they not teaching that is used on the job?
- billy99k 1y ago
  When I was in college, we had our base software development courses and could choose web development as an elective. Our class taught .NET.
toolslive 1y ago
indeed. The problem with being expose do to something so much more clean/elegant/powerful than the languages employers are using is that you no longer want to do it. It's like having tasted good whisky. You no longer think Jack's acceptable. These days, employers more or less get what they wanted. We're doomed.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

NewsaHackO 1y ago

Executable pseudocode is an oxymoron.

unethical_ban 1y ago
"essentially", come now. The point is that python's syntax reads a lot more plainly and logically for learning than something like Java.
- NewsaHackO 1y ago
  I am confused, what is the relevance of the word essentially?
  - unethical_ban 1y ago
    Do you agree or disagree that Python is more readable/closer to pseudocode than say Java or C++? Less syntactic sugar, no need to define namespaces/classes, more intuitive for declarations, etc.
    - NewsaHackO 1y ago
      Would you consider essentially dry water to be semantically correct phrase?
      - unethical_ban 1y ago
        I understood the meaning of their phrase and explained it. You assert that the original phrase is incomprehensible and meaningless. We see things differently.
ted_dunning 1y ago
And so is Python in many ways. The shoe fits.
- gjm11 1y ago

souldzin 1y ago

Are functional languages more computer science than imperative languages?

remexre 1y ago
Formal reasoning about functional programs in terms of their (denotational) semantics is normal in a functional programming class (e.g. it's about a quarter of our mandatory-for-undergrads FP course). Formal reasoning about imperative programs in terms of their (e.g. axiomatic) semantics is only in a grad-level course, and the programs you can reason about are really, really limited compared to the functional ones. (The last time I TA'd the FP class, one of the homeworks involved proving a simple compiler correct. When I took the grad course, I think the most complicated program we proved correct was selection sort.) I think "reasoning about programs" is more computer-science than "writing programs," and choosing an imperative language signals that you're not emphasizing the former.
dehrmann 1y ago
It's one way of modelling the broad notion an algorithm, but it isn't the only one, and it's odd to treat it as the one true expression of computer science when essentially all modern computing follows a different model.

raverbashing 1y ago

Lambda Calculus is one of those things that look good on paper as a theory construct but in practice it's not a great abstraction. And honestly you could go your whole career without touching it, maybe only for the naming of an anonymous function. Boolean logic, graphs, FSMs, set theory, mathematical proofs, pretty much all user here or there. Lambda calculus? Unless you're one of those Haskell fans, meh.

Koshkin 1y ago
> Haskell https://book.realworldhaskell.org/ https://book.realworldhaskell.org/

kec 1y ago

Computer Engineering is its own discipline, typically lumped with Electrical Engineering, which is more about system architecture and design and only touches on programming at a low level such as device firmware. What I think you're really lamenting is the devolution of CS education to vocational programming.

lupusreal 1y ago
I think he meant software engineering.
- leoc 1y ago
  “Software Engineering” tends to be about project management: schedules and organisation, estimation, defect rates and so on. For vocational training on existing IT systems (including some coding), which I assume is more what the course focused on, then “Management Information Systems” or “Information Technology” would be the more traditional names IIUC.

wslh 1y ago

> LISP dialects like Scheme are excellent for teaching pure computer science because they are the closest thing to executing lambda calculus expressions. Assembler too. For example, Knuth's [M]MIX in The Art of Computer Programming. That said, this is an introductory programming course, and there are separate courses focused on algorithms (which are not the same as programming). I agree with the article: programming has changed dramatically, while the core of algorithms remains largely unchanged.

dartharva 1y ago

> the more general trend of colleges becoming more vocational Things would be so much better if this were actually true..

darksaints 1y ago

Colleges becoming more vocational is a consequence of colleges becoming more expensive for students. If you are paying all of that money for college, you better get a good job out of it. I don't see that as a bad thing necessarily, but it would definitely be nice if we had better paths for those who want to end up in research. I'd argue that SML (or derivative thereof) would make for a better teaching language, for both the lambda calculus aspect and the type theory aspect.

Jtsummers 1y ago
> I'd argue that SML (or derivative thereof) would make for a better teaching language, for both the lambda calculus aspect and the type theory aspect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098598 A critique along those lines which suggests KRC and Miranda which are in the same vein as SML.
throwaway328 1y ago
I suspect you might be observing two correlates and picking one as the cause of the other in a way that is ahistorical. Specifically, it seems to me that colleges becoming more vocational and colleges becoming more expensive are both natural outcomes of the neoliberalisation of all things. I am aware that some students now rationalise their educational investments with the logic you describe above, but I think it's a post-hoc rationalisation. You can get a good job without going to college, and you can get a good education without paying a gazillion bucks. A side point, but calling it "vocational" seems a bit euphemistic too. Learning carpentry is a vocation. Getting a business degree is not equivalent to learning carpentry. I might say colleges have become commercialised, rather.
marsten 1y ago
I attribute the curriculum shift to something slightly different, which is the changing perception of CS as a career. When I was in college in the late 1980s, CS was not perceived as the moneymaking career it is today. Accordingly the kids who went into CS were typically the nerds and hackers who truly loved the field. Many kids now perceive CS as a safe, lucrative career option akin to becoming a doctor or lawyer. It attracts many students who are smart but perhaps not as intrinsically excited about the field. The universities adjusted their curricula to what these students care about: Less beautiful theory, and more practical training. A similar thing happened in statistics. At one time it was hardcore stats nerds. Now "data science" has brought a ton more people into the field and the teaching methods have changed dramatically.

Karrot_Kream 1y ago

When this kind of switch was happening in CS departments, as a graduate student I was part of a "movement" that advocated for switching away from things like Scheme to Python for introductory classes in my elite CS institution. (We focused on other things as well such as more interdisciplinary research, which was where I was more passionate, but that's a separate matter.) My reasoning at the time in this order was: 1. Widely used tools and practices offer a flywheel of usefulness that can help motivate undergrads to learn about computation. Once you learn Scheme, well now you've learned Scheme. But at the time if you had learned Python you could then use something like Python's system and socket APIs to play around with the lab or personal Linux systems. On the web side, there was web.py or Flask (haha this was the late 2000s/early 2010s) to motivate yourself to keep going. The student could spend their summer building apps and tools so that they appreciate computation for more than just its "aesthetic" beauty. This was a time when CS wasn't all that prestigious on its own and salaries weren't as high as they are now, so many folks who banged their head against Scheme or MMIX or LC3 would just churn to the EE or MechE departments. 2. As a grad student it was almost trivial to set an exam paper that could weed out most of the class. This was especially trivial at the introductory class level where Scheme would be taught. If the concern was rigor it was very simple to maintain the rigor in other ways. 3. For better or for worse many undergrads had no intent of going to grad school, and many of the undergrads taking our classes weren't even students of computer science. They were electrical engineers or industrial engineers who wanted to learn enough programming to automate things in their field but were more interested in their actual areas of concentration. In the years since my thinking around this evolved, but I still share the same conviction I did then. Probably moreso given the sheer ubiquity of Python now.

em-bee 1y ago
help motivate undergrads to learn about computation. Once you learn Scheme, well now you've learned Scheme. But at the time if you had learned Python you could then use something like Python's system and socket APIs to play around with the lab or personal Linux systems that's a good point actually. i had scheme, modula and others i don't remember in my undergrad classes. i remember almost nothing from that time. but at the same time i met some students running an LPmud, where i learned LPC, and then i discovered roxen and pike (which is based on LPC) which i used in all my volunteer and fun programming work. in other words all my motivation for learning stuff came from the outside.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

"Computer engineering" isn't vocational. It's an entire sub-specialty involving hardware theory and application. "Programming" is the vocational shift which was traditionally outside the purview of academic curricula. You're not engineering anything if you don't have a repeatable process that will deliver expected results. Programming alone doesn't meet that bar.

tombert 1y ago

I just completed the WGU Masters in "Computer Science". I put the scare quotes around "Computer Science", because outside of a single algorithms and data structure course and a single AI course (which was extremely high level), it was purely engineering stuff. One assignment had me deploying stuff with AWS, I was designing wireframes of potential "apps" I could create, and I had to write one HTTP server. It was kind of fun and it was nice that I was able to complete it quickly, but it really shouldn't be called "Computer Science", it should be called Software Engineering. There's nothing wrong with software engineering, I just view it as distinct-but-related from CS.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago

> Isn't this just part of the broader trend of CS departments switching away from teaching computer science to teaching computer engineering Computer engineering is similar as hard as computer science (don't start the discussion which one is harder ;-) ). What CS departments instead switch to is teaching some shallow, applied programming knowledge.

ajkjk 1y ago

I think it's absurd to start with Scheme. A graduate who knows Python but not Scheme has a hope of doing something with computer science. A graduate who knows Scheme but not Python is basically unable to use computers at a technical level. The only choices here are "Python" or "Scheme + Python". (Yes, of course, they could teach themselves Python at that point---but if we're talking about things that people can teach themselves, they can teach themselves the whole curriculum and both languages; the debate here is over what the university should hold them accountable to learn).

Jtsummers 1y ago
> I think it's absurd to start with Scheme. A graduate who knows Python but not Scheme has a hope of doing something with computer science. A graduate who knows Scheme but not Python is basically unable to use computers at a technical level. What language you start with and what languages you know on graduating are going to be different. It takes 4 years to get through most bachelors programs (without taking summer terms, very high course loads, or coming in with a bunch of transfer credits). It's no more absurd to start with Scheme than to start with Python when there are at least 7 semesters remaining to learn more. If a graduate only knows what they learned in CS 1, they aren't a CS graduate even if they got that slip of paper. They conned the school, or the school conned them.
Hammershaft 1y ago
It's easier to explore deeper concepts learning with scheme because the language is such a simple and introspective encapsulation of generalized computer science concepts.
wat10000 1y ago
I and about a million other programmers started with BASIC. My second language was Pascal. I don’t imagine I’d be very employable if that’s all I knew, but it turns out that you can learn many programming languages and it’s not all that much effort after the first two or three. There’s no reason to think the language you start with should be one that you could get paid to use. And no, I wouldn’t recommend starting with BASIC. But starting with Scheme seems like a great choice.

pk455 1y ago

> most common language a computer engineer Depends on your definition of a computer engineer. Dealing with strings in Python vs. dealing with character arrays in C is a world of a difference. The decision to use Python feels like a solid compromise between giving the students a stair step to applied computer science work, while stripping away the cruft and language-specifics that would distract from implementing the more theoretical learning material

Kwpolska 1y ago
Depends on which part of the theory you care about. Lists in Python are a magic structure that can grow and shrink at will. That's a bit too high level to be useful for learning the theory.

williamcotton 1y ago

I think you mean software engineering. Computer engineering is computing hardware, CPUs, etc.

wolpoli 1y ago

I took Scheme for my second programming course, after C++. I think Scheme is simpler to understand. It also allowed students to explore various concepts that weren't available in C++. I enjoy the course. But since I never took compiler theories and other courses on programming language, I never bumped into many of those concepts again except for those where modern languages adopted the same feature, and I ended up having to relearn them anyway. Hence, I would also argue that these days, most students would have been better served starting with a practical language.

zozbot234 1y ago

> Whereas Python is excellent for teaching applied computer engineering, because it's essentially executable pseudocode for imperative languages It's not that simple, Python is a fiddly, complex, high-level language that has accreted features in a very ad-hoc way. This makes it very hard to teach and learn in a way that's expected to pay even the most cursory attention to actual rigor. You could probably define a Baby Python subset of the language that's just as simple and rigorously defined as Scheme and teach that, but this isn't how the new MIT intro courses have been designed.

gowld 1y ago
Python was invented as a language for newbies. It's come a long way! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_1 > During Van Rossum's stay at CNRI, he launched the Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E) initiative, intending to make programming more accessible to more people, with a basic "literacy" in programming languages, similar to the basic English literacy and mathematics skills required by most employers. Python served a central role in this: because of its focus on clean syntax, it was already suitable, and CP4E's goals bore similarities to its predecessor, ABC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language) > It is intended for teaching or prototyping
- bmitc 1y ago
  It was an attempt but a bad one.
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  > "Python was invented as a language for newbies." Yeah, but so was BASIC. If Edsger Dijkstra were alive today to write an updated edition of his infamous "How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt?" essay, he'd probably just just reuse his quip for BASIC for Python.
leoc 1y ago
> You could probably define a Baby Python subset of the language that's just as simple and rigorously defined as Scheme and teach that Pyret https://pyret.org/ https://pyret.org/ started out with more or less that ambition I think. IIRC its author had previously tried to work with Python (and its dev team) but gave up.

zahlman 1y ago

> Whereas Python is excellent for teaching applied computer engineering, because it's essentially executable pseudocode for imperative languages Python offers quite good multi-paradigm support and could absolutely be used to explore many key concepts from SICP (granted, nothing is as meta-programmable as the Lisp family, since AST manipulation in other languages requires additional steps to actually obtain an AST). In particular, since Python's object model includes functions, higher-order functions are possible (and indeed, `map` is a builtin, and `reduce` is in the standard library after previous demotion from builtin status). Nowadays of course it's fashionable to litter the code with manifest type hints, which are a distraction to that sort of pedagogy. However, they are still entirely optional, have zero-to-generally-irrelevant effect at runtime, and can simply be disregarded.