I think this is a technology evolution natural move. This will probably happen every few decades to the most capable new language or platform. There is a stro

I think this is a technology evolution natural move. This will probably happen every few decades to the most capable new language or platform. There is a strong religious backing to Scheme being the only way to teach core CS fundamentals at MIT. I think that is an emotional almost fanboy reaction at times probably filled with heavy bias. Python is a great balance of showing many sides of programming, it can be as eye opening as Lisp. Python is functional and object-oriented. Python is a simplifying tool and culture. All platforms used here should be simplifying. Python can get you building market ready desktop applications, web applications, building robotics, scientific computing, game development, algorithms and AI and nearly anything out there Python is at the tip of the spear. Python is rapid iterations and prototype friendly. The frameworks of Python are more capable to wrap nearly anything, that is what software engineering is about now. It is the same evolution software process has taken from the CMM, to CMMI (supporting modular and libraries), to Agile and a more natural iterative process rather than top down design everything from the bottom up approach. You can still do that, it is just not the majority of software engineering today, and it will continue to simplify. Are Scheme and Lisp programmers who are biased because they had that more hardcore bottom up technique really thinking this degrades the experience or is this more of a bias that is being attacked. Or has software engineering fundamentally changed? Scheme will not go away. This does not mean that people will stop making compilers or REPL. It simply means the starting place is different. It might even drive some better compilers and multi-platform tools because of the quirkiness of many compiler systems out there will drive good engineeers to simplify that process. That is what we do, we simplify problems. I would argue Python makes for more marketable and capable graduates to be successful almost immediately after school, but I don't think it harms the fundamentals much. Good developers and engineers still take time to get better. No one is the best programmer in college, it takes time and experiences after the academics to be highly skilled. Python fits closely with computer science and is very capable of taking the torch. I do think that there is a benefit to learning from a more difficult and core understanding because it is more downhill from there but Python is hardly the worst case scenario here. I think that Python is perfect for teaching CS because of the flexibility, libraries, open source but support by Google (they are big on CS and like Python) and many other reasons. What can you make in Scheme that you can't make in Python, very little. Would you rather it be Java or C# they are teaching?