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Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

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Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#101

Post by garmaine »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #100
zmmmmm wrote: post #89

I feel like Python is too half baked to be a really good language to teach fundamentals. By "half baked" I mean - sort of supports functional programming, but not really. Sort of supports object oriented design, but not really. Sort of allows type system theory to be taught, but not really. So many sort ofs. It's a great language if you just want to get someone cranking some code. But if I wanted a language to be a b…

Wait, don't all these "sort ofs" make it actually an ideal tool for teaching the basics? I mean, we're talking about basics, so what you're saying is that you can teach the basics of a number of different paradigms with one language.

It's very hard to teach the value of some approach if you can only see it implemented half-way.

Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#102

Post by piyush_soni »

southerndrift wrote: post #43
karmasimida wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned Python as my first TRUE(explain later) language and I will be forever grateful for it. Now I am a polyglot, jumping through multiple languages all the time, be it Python/Java/Javascript, or occasionally flirtation with some languages that are foreign to my daily routine but necessary to get my job done. I am not quite on board with you claim that Python is chosen for monetary benefits. To be a qualified pro…

Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme.

I have working knowledge of C, C++, Scheme, and a little bit of Python, but I really don't think Scheme is true to all its hype. I'm not even sure if everyone praising it here is using it in real life projects or not or only academically. We do, and man, the tough life is with it. The only debugging we have here is numerous "format (print)" statements, it is terribly slow, and may be not everyone's using it as intended, but the way it promotes "lists" for everything is just plain wrong IMHO. End result, a lot of wrongful uses of searching in lists where a proper C/C++ data structure would prove much faster.

Oh, and the deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code.

Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#103

Post by nestorD »

zmmmmm wrote: post #89

I feel like Python is too half baked to be a really good language to teach fundamentals. By "half baked" I mean - sort of supports functional programming, but not really. Sort of supports object oriented design, but not really. Sort of allows type system theory to be taught, but not really. So many sort ofs. It's a great language if you just want to get someone cranking some code. But if I wanted a language to be a b…

F# would be a good candidate. It covers all dominant paradigms without exploding complexity.

Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#104

Post by lozenge »

zmmmmm wrote: post #89

I feel like Python is too half baked to be a really good language to teach fundamentals. By "half baked" I mean - sort of supports functional programming, but not really. Sort of supports object oriented design, but not really. Sort of allows type system theory to be taught, but not really. So many sort ofs. It's a great language if you just want to get someone cranking some code. But if I wanted a language to be a b…

The first course doesn't need to touch on every programming style. Python is fine for learning imperative basics (preconditions, postconditions of your loops and methods, etc)

Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#105

Post by craigsmansion »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #100
zmmmmm wrote: post #89

I feel like Python is too half baked to be a really good language to teach fundamentals. By "half baked" I mean - sort of supports functional programming, but not really. Sort of supports object oriented design, but not really. Sort of allows type system theory to be taught, but not really. So many sort ofs. It's a great language if you just want to get someone cranking some code. But if I wanted a language to be a b…

Wait, don't all these "sort ofs" make it actually an ideal tool for teaching the basics? I mean, we're talking about basics, so what you're saying is that you can teach the basics of a number of different paradigms with one language.

> what you're saying is that you can teach the basics of a number of different paradigms with one language.

I don't know about Python, but that is one of the delights of SICP and scheme in general.

It's not that there isn't a OO implementation in scheme; it's that there are too many. Implementing an OO system is a medium-advanced exercise left to the reader. As a result there are many available, up to the point one wonders if "OO" can be rightfully coined "a paradigm".

Constraint based/logic programming? I think it's a chapter in SICP, and covered by one of the SICP video lectures showing how to build a simple prolog-like language to illustrate some other concept

Type systems? This one is a little funny. There's a SICP lecture on it (the recordings are from the 80s), and I thought it was an unfortunate choice of name, since "type systems" are a real and important concept now in modern computer languages and the naming would clash, but no, it actually was an implementation of a type system as we now use the term.

I think one of the reasons scheme doesn't have "a lot of stuff" is because most stuff, if well understood, is trivial. If it doesn't seem trivial, one simply doesn't have a deep enough understanding of the concepts yet.

One of the things about using scheme effectively as a teaching language is that it puts the wizardry in the actual wizard, not in the magic box with the blinkenlights.

Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#106

Post by bjoli »

jimhefferon wrote: post #97
jcelerier wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme. the school I went used to teach C, Python and Scheme in the first year (nowadays it's C, Python and Racket). I don't think I remember more than one or two people actually liking the LISP experience, how bad it was when comparing to other l…

I'd be interested in what aspects strike people as bad. (Honest question. If you reply, I promise not to come back with "But, but, but ...")

One thing that comes to mind is that looping is limited to recursion in scheme. This becomes quite coumbersome IMO since it is a pretty important thing. Writing named lets for simple things is not anyone's preferred way.

It is however pretty easy to implement something like racket's for loops on scheme using lower level macros, and there are some available.

Implementing something like common lisps iter is actually not very hard, and even improving upon racket's for loops is far from complex.

Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#107

Post by bjoli »

piyush_soni wrote: post #102
southerndrift wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to C, Python is the better choice. However, it seems like you haven't learned a Lisp dialect. I would love to know if you would still prefer Python once you know Scheme.

I have working knowledge of C, C++, Scheme, and a little bit of Python, but I really don't think Scheme is true to all its hype. I'm not even sure if everyone praising it here is using it in real life projects or not or only academically. We do, and man, the tough life is with it. The only debugging we have here is numerous "format (print)" statements, it is terribly slow, and may be not everyone's using it as intend…

Which scheme are you using? Chez, chicken, guile and gambit all have pretty good debugging facilities, and a macro like chez's trace-lambda is a lot better than misusing print-debugging in most cases.

Nobody ever said most list operations is anything else than o(n), and if you are using lists you are probably using the wrong data structure. Vectors or hash tables would probably be a better choice (which are provided by all serious schemes).

Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#108

Post by b3b0p »

Where I went to school, they didn't teach programming at all. First day, first class, if I remember correctly, the teacher walks up in front of the class and says something like, "Computer science is the design and implementation of algorithms..." and finishes with saying they won't teach us any programming. The assignments must be implemented in C and run on campus computers. There are optional, zero credit labs to get help learning to program or get help with homework held by the TA's.

I went to one lab, the lab computers and all campus computers were running Slackware with Afterstep. I was a Window Maker and Red Hat user at the time, I was impressed and thought it was neat.

Of course this is from memory and 18 years ago almost to the day, but that's the gist of it. Anyway, I felt like I learned a ton and loved it every bit. I went to a few of the CS club meetings and got the impression basically every one had already had internships with Intel, IBM, or Microsoft. This was my freshmen year and was basically in awe.

Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#109

Post by hopler »

munificent wrote: post #71
ng12 wrote: post #2

> However, he did say that starting off with python makes an undergraduate’s initial experiences maximally productive in the current environment. I read this as "the parents paying tuition wanted their kids to learn practical skills so they can make money". I learned Scheme as a first language and I will be forever grateful for it.

Counter-point: Everyone is grateful for our formative experiences because those experiences shape our identity, and we're obviously heavily emotionally invested in who we are. But we highly overvalue which formative experiences matter. If I were to get into a time machine, go into your past, remove Scheme and swap in some other language, you'd probably be grateful today for whatever that other language was. It just h…

This is exactly it. Nostalgia is overpowering.

Re: Why MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for its undergraduate CS program (2009)

#110

Post by hopler »

curun1r wrote: post #19
ng12 wrote: post #2

> However, he did say that starting off with python makes an undergraduate’s initial experiences maximally productive in the current environment. I read this as "the parents paying tuition wanted their kids to learn practical skills so they can make money". I learned Scheme as a first language and I will be forever grateful for it.

Same here. When I learned programming at UC Berkeley in the 90s, Scheme was the intro language. It was perfect precisely because it was so far from being the kind of language you'd use to engineer large projects. The first day, the professor spent less than half of the period introducing the entire syntax of the language...it's so damn simple. Beyond that, all learning was abstraction, problem solving and CS concepts…

The article is 10 years old. Has MIT graduated a generation of failures?
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