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Comment by fire_lake | Hacker News Reader

Tragic that they replaced Lisp with Python in universities. We’re suppose to be learning about computation, not corporate duct taping.

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Plenty of universities teach Lisp, Haskell, Scala, Reason, etc..

The SICP course as it is taught today at MIT had Scheme replaced with Python some years ago. I'm assuming that's what OP was referring to.

I don't think the new course is "SICP with Python"; my impression (from talking to GJS!) is it's a different course that now uses Python. But maybe someone here has experience with it & can speak up.

That's not accurate. They retired SICP and added a new introductory course [1] based on Python to placate the suits. Neither Sussman nor any of the other SICP folk is involved with that.

Sussman created a follow-up course to SICP [2] which is still based on Lisp and still being offered today.

[1] https://irreal.org/blog/?p=11127

[2] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/

My academic life would be complete after cursing the neo-SICP course.

but then again lisp got replaced in practice and is only really a niche language nowadays

so the move away from lisp is not bad

and while i dont like python purely as programming language (its not theoretically engaging or fun) python is top 3 or 5 in practice, people like it

People like coldplay and voted for the Nazis!

This is missing the forest for the trees. The language for a university course in computation needn't be "commercially relevant". What's important is whether it serves the pedagogical purpose of teaching students to think about computation.

Learning this or that programming language isn't at all what it's about--you can (and will over and over again throughout your career) do that on your own time. It's about developing the abstract thought pathways that enable you to quickly learn and think about computing.

I don't know why MIT chose to stop teaching the course, but it sure would lower my opinion of that institution if it was something to do with the direct commercial appeal of "knowing Python".

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