A Scheme Story (1992)

My first CS class in college was in Scheme. I had essentially the same experience as t Scheme made it far easier to learn than any other languages I had used then (like Java and Python). We learned everything we needed to know about the language itself in a single week--three lectures--and then spent the rest of the semester learning brilliant concepts.<p>This course has recently been replaced with a parody: the same text (SICP) but in Python. Of course, since Python lacks Scheme's simplicity and elegance, far more time is spent on the language itself rather than on important concepts.<p>Also, a bunch of things that are not too magical in Scheme, like mutation and object-oriented programming, are naked right into Python. One of my most important realizations from this class was that things like mutation and OOP are not just posts of the language and are not omnipresent. Coming from Jeans, this was quite the insight!<p>Another important thing I picked up from the course was an appreciation for functional programming. Python's design and philosophy are rather hostile to any nontrivial functional programming--it's not Pythonic!--which is very unfortunate for the new students' development.<p>In short, I think Scheme is a great introductory language and I am very sad to see it replaced with Python.

The diagnosis of CS education seems correct, at least. My high-school AP CS course, in C++, seemed primarily dedicated to teaching and then testing an arbitrary grab-bag of C++ syntax and STL features. There is no way that class would have gotten me interested in programming if I weren't already. What did get me into programming was writing scripts in mIRC's idiosyncratic custom scripting language, on my own time.<p>But I think it's more than the language choice that's the problem. You can make a course into arbitrary memorization in just about any language, though some languages may make it particularly easy. In one nice turn of phrase, Seymour Papert quoted a student contrasting two uses of Logo: "In the summer, we learned to program. At school, they are teaching us to write a program." [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/papert85_logovisions.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/papert85_logovisions.html</a>

Where did you find this article? Thanks for posting it.