<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:53 AM, David Knupp <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:knupp@well.com">knupp@well.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
On Apr 6, 2009, at 9:31 AM, Aahz wrote:<br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
(There's a joke that writing a web framework is the Python equivalent of<br>
working through SICP.)<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I remember this quip being posted to the list several weeks ago. Well, it turns out that it was prescient. M.I.T. has apparently made the historic decision to teach their introductory 6.001 course using Python instead of Scheme! (My apologies if this has been mentioned before, and I somehow missed it.)<br>
<br>
Here are some relevant links:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/learning/coursework/" target="_blank">http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/learning/coursework/</a>the_end_of_an_era_1.shtml<br>
<a href="http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/03" target="_blank">http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/03</a></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I find this quote particularly interesting:</div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Optima; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(119, 119, 119); ">Critically, this is the world for which scheme was originally designed. Building larger programs out of a group of very small, understandable pieces is what things like recursion and functional programming are built for.</span></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#777777" face="Optima" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><br></span></font></div><div>The irony of this for me was that when I was learning Scheme in college, the actual implementation of Scheme itself was a total mystery. It was just this magical thing that 'just worked' - I could understand C and Pascal because I could understand what they compiled down to. It took me at least 5 years of professional experience after college before I really understood how a higher-order language was implemented. </div>
<div><br></div><div>So at least for me, writing is Scheme was about building on a complex, hard-to-understand piece, even if the language itself was small and easy to understand and write in. Frankly it doesn't seem much different than Python in that context!</div>
<div><br></div><div>Alec</div></div>