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"MIT restructured its curriculum" because after the dot.com bust, EECS enrollment dropped by more than 1/2 after being a solid 40% of undergraduates for more th

by hga 11y ago

"MIT restructured its curriculum" because after the dot.com bust, EECS enrollment dropped by more than 1/2 after being a solid 40% of undergraduates for more than 2 decades, and the department panicked. And, yeah, punting teaching the fundamentals for some hand-on work (robots, communications) was part of that. There was also a commandment from on-high, don't know if this was above the department or in it from long simmering resentment, to entirely purge Scheme from the curriculum. Given all that, Python was perhaps the least worst choice (although using Java to teach the rest of what's in SICP is not even wrong), although I personally wonder about the wisdom of purging functional programming from the curriculum at the same time that multi-cores may be making it a lot more relevant.

agumonkey 11y ago
Any data on the 'purge scheme' desire ? I find it really really strange. Was it related to post-hire issues ? or student problems ?
- hga 11y ago
  Nothing besides the obvious you get from the curriculum being 100% Python and Java (yep, MIT is now a "Java school"), and there being no common CS and EE curriculum besides those first two lab intense robots and communications classes (previously there was a core of SICP, two EE classes and a low level computer micro- and macro-architecture course, 6.001-4). MIT EECS degrees, while still representing what MIT thinks its EECS graduates should know, now mean something very different, and that has, e.g. resulted in much greater differentiation between it and CMU, which has embraced functional programming in its core curriculum.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    Yeah, and there were videos about MIT focusing more on 'material' engineering, giving ceramics playgrounds for students, rather than theory and software. In a way MIT is right, computer had their days, now things are back to the real world. Augmented reality, physical interactions, IoT, sensors etc etc. But at the same time FP gives better ways to reason and write solid code anyhow.
    - hga 11y ago
      In a way MIT is right, computer had their days, now things are back to the real world. MIT handled this very poorly; it's always been very conservative about bulking up departments because things can radically change. Aero/Astro was red hot from, oh, post-WWI to the early 1970s, when it catastrophically crashed without to this date a recovery. For decades EECS struggled with 40% of the undergraduates and ~1/6th of the institute's resources, in fact when they adopted the old core of 6.001-4 in the early '80s they dropped the "service" course that taught introductory programming for lack of human resources. I don't know how much the faculty was bulked up, the ultimate metric, but before the dot.com crash they committed a quarter billion dollars to a new CS research building that was ugly, very dysfunctional, and expensive to operate (so insecure it requires a full time police officer). Anyway, I judge that "had their days" differently, at least in the longer term. Most specifically, one of these days a programming error will kill thousands or tens of thousands of people, and at least part of the field will radically change as people get more serious about "quality" software. (Scare quotes because e.g. Facebook and Boeing have very different, and correct for both of them, definitions of software quality.)
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        By computers I meant desktops and their software or web apps. I was shallow anyhow, and you're right it will end up as reorganization in the field.

by hga 11y ago

agumonkey 11y ago

Any data on the 'purge scheme' desire ? I find it really really strange. Was it related to post-hire issues ? or student problems ?

hga 11y ago
Nothing besides the obvious you get from the curriculum being 100% Python and Java (yep, MIT is now a "Java school"), and there being no common CS and EE curriculum besides those first two lab intense robots and communications classes (previously there was a core of SICP, two EE classes and a low level computer micro- and macro-architecture course, 6.001-4). MIT EECS degrees, while still representing what MIT thinks its EECS graduates should know, now mean something very different, and that has, e.g. resulted in much greater differentiation between it and CMU, which has embraced functional programming in its core curriculum.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Yeah, and there were videos about MIT focusing more on 'material' engineering, giving ceramics playgrounds for students, rather than theory and software. In a way MIT is right, computer had their days, now things are back to the real world. Augmented reality, physical interactions, IoT, sensors etc etc. But at the same time FP gives better ways to reason and write solid code anyhow.
  - hga 11y ago
    In a way MIT is right, computer had their days, now things are back to the real world. MIT handled this very poorly; it's always been very conservative about bulking up departments because things can radically change. Aero/Astro was red hot from, oh, post-WWI to the early 1970s, when it catastrophically crashed without to this date a recovery. For decades EECS struggled with 40% of the undergraduates and ~1/6th of the institute's resources, in fact when they adopted the old core of 6.001-4 in the early '80s they dropped the "service" course that taught introductory programming for lack of human resources. I don't know how much the faculty was bulked up, the ultimate metric, but before the dot.com crash they committed a quarter billion dollars to a new CS research building that was ugly, very dysfunctional, and expensive to operate (so insecure it requires a full time police officer). Anyway, I judge that "had their days" differently, at least in the longer term. Most specifically, one of these days a programming error will kill thousands or tens of thousands of people, and at least part of the field will radically change as people get more serious about "quality" software. (Scare quotes because e.g. Facebook and Boeing have very different, and correct for both of them, definitions of software quality.)
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      By computers I meant desktops and their software or web apps. I was shallow anyhow, and you're right it will end up as reorganization in the field.