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Like it or not, universities have started to move away from teaching Scheme to introductory CS students. You may remember that much was made of MIT and Berkeley

by ek 13y ago

Like it or not, universities have started to move away from teaching Scheme to introductory CS students. You may remember that much was made of MIT and Berkeley switching away from Scheme for Python. I think Pyret comes out of a precedent of Python as the new standard, so in that light, it's certainly an improvement.

stass 13y ago
That's because they stopped teaching CS, it's not that they replaced Scheme with Python in CS courses. How can you possible teach metacircular interpreters, constraint propagation languages, ambiguous computation and similar constructs using Python when you need to be able to easily define a completely different language semantics using language at hand? In that sense, Pyret will allow them to teach a bit more CS than possible using ordinary Python but still is in no way fit for something on the level of SICP.
- skrishnamurthi 13y ago
  The textbook that accompanies Pyret (http://papl.cs.brown.edu/2013/ http://papl.cs.brown.edu/2013/) covers many of these topics: the second half of this book is a full-blown programming languages text (formerly a stand-alone book known to some as PLAI). I fully agree that you can't cover these things well in Python, and most Python textbooks don't, because of the poverty of datatypes and the difficulty of creating new structured ones. However, while I think SICP is the greatest computer science book ever written, it has its own share of blind spots (for a simple example, see [the lack of] types or pervasive specification and testing). So the above book takes a somewhat different take on these issues. But it hews closer to SICP than any Python book I've seen.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  The university where I graduated from in 1999, still has lots of CS lectures, including lots of compiler design lectures. We never used Lisp based languages on our lectures, rather Caml Light (nowadays OCaml) and Prolog.

by ek 13y ago

stass 13y ago

That's because they stopped teaching CS, it's not that they replaced Scheme with Python in CS courses. How can you possible teach metacircular interpreters, constraint propagation languages, ambiguous computation and similar constructs using Python when you need to be able to easily define a completely different language semantics using language at hand? In that sense, Pyret will allow them to teach a bit more CS than possible using ordinary Python but still is in no way fit for something on the level of SICP.

skrishnamurthi 13y ago
The textbook that accompanies Pyret (http://papl.cs.brown.edu/2013/ http://papl.cs.brown.edu/2013/) covers many of these topics: the second half of this book is a full-blown programming languages text (formerly a stand-alone book known to some as PLAI). I fully agree that you can't cover these things well in Python, and most Python textbooks don't, because of the poverty of datatypes and the difficulty of creating new structured ones. However, while I think SICP is the greatest computer science book ever written, it has its own share of blind spots (for a simple example, see [the lack of] types or pervasive specification and testing). So the above book takes a somewhat different take on these issues. But it hews closer to SICP than any Python book I've seen.
pjmlp 13y ago
The university where I graduated from in 1999, still has lots of CS lectures, including lots of compiler design lectures. We never used Lisp based languages on our lectures, rather Caml Light (nowadays OCaml) and Prolog.