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Comment by peter303 | Hacker News Reader

LISP was the introductory computer class language at MIT for nearly 40 years. The faculty felt it exhibited the important elements of programming and algorithms. Some students complained they wanted something more practical for getting a job. It appears the newer faculty replaced it with Python.

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I dunno if it is MIT but I saw a SICP Javascript edition listed recently. That felt... weird. I watched at least some of the old SICP videos on youtube which are still mind blowing and worth a look. It does list Sussman and Abelson as authors on the amazon page...

The MIT SICP course is pretty amazing. Would be a shame if they replaced it with Python. I use Python every day, but it's far more complicated to use it to demonstrate various properties of programming languages due to its great complexity.

don't worry, they have JavaScript version now. maybe it more complex, but at least can execute immediately.

The MIT Scheme interpreter executes immediately, like Python.

Maybe people these days can't handle anything beyond a browser?

wow, do you understand it can't run on windows? so guess you require student who bought windows computer give up programming? last time, I installed Racket and get sicp module. guess people really need move to JavaScript. at least, they don't need to spend time on this.

My understanding is that the authors of SICP themselves wanted to update the curriculum - not just a language change, but to cover something at a higher level of abstraction.

See: https://youtu.be/OgRFOjVzvm0

That's not quite accurate. Sussman says that the more fundamental computer science that he and Abelson had taught up to 1997 or so had become obsolete, because the transistors had disappeared into massive chips and the code had disappeared into libraries. Software and hardware became a matter of integration.

He told the MIT people in charge of developing courses that he and Abelson were quitting, and they should figure out what to do next. The world had moved on to interfacing complex chips to sensors and actuators, and it wasn't easy, because the chips were imperfectly specified. To a certain degree, you tried different things to see what worked. I think he was rather disgusted with the situation, compared to the clarity he had a couple of decades earlier using Scheme.

So, the MIT professors that replaced him went with Python. It had great libraries, and it was amenable to fast turn-around when gluing software and hardware together in the lab.

I had a discussion with Sussman a decade or so ago about this, and what he told me then agrees with what he says in the video.

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