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.
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 programmer, there is so much more need to be learnt beyond Python. Python however, is a GREAT choice to overcome the initial fear of writing code in general, because it is more tolerant.
My actual first language is C, and before my college I have never done programming before. I have to say, looking back, learning C as my first language without fully understanding the modern computer architecture is a horrible experience: so many questions as to why things is what it is now, so many traps, crazy pointers, cryptic errors, nightmare segmentfault. Programming is just very frustrating experience to me that the time. Of course, later on, it all makes sense, even pointer seems like a great idea(you can't have more freedom than that), just that we need to put great efforts regulating the use of it to prevent irregular behaviors.
On the other hand, Python is a tolerant language, yet providing a pretty comprehensive sets of primitives to play and experiment with. Had I started with Python, I might not waste the initial year struggling and questioning myself whether I could program at all.
People often talk about how simple Python is, but many of them have either no experience with or no appreciation for Scheme. When they do have exposure to Scheme, it tends to be some ancient, primitive dialect like MIT Scheme rather than modern, full-featured scheme like Chicken, or Racket, or Guile -- so they look at Scheme as a toy language. I don't know how often I've heard comments along the lines of Scheme being a fine academic language but impractical for real work.
Python does have a little nice lispyness to it, but it's deliberately limited by the language designers, the syntax is lacking and it has many frustrating inconsistencies and gotchas. Programming in Scheme is just so much easier.
Want to learn how a computer works? Learn C.
Want to study abstract comp-sci concepts? Learn Scheme.
Want to wire together libraries to get something running in the messy real world? Learn Python (or something similiar).
A well-rounded CS education really ought to include all of these to at least some degree.
Regarding Python vs. Scheme, I like both languages. I tend to prefer Python for certain types of programming, like NLP, machine learning, and math, just because the available libraries are so good. Having said that, I feel that the functional paradigm is superior to procedural programming and definitely (for me anyway) better than OOP, so for everything else I'd choose Scheme or some other functional language, like Elixir, Elm, Haskell, or Erlang, depending on my mood and what I'm doing.
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 languages is actually a common joke subject amongst alumni.
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.
I believe that Scheme's DO is looping.
Functional programming of course maps (heh) very cleanly to this line of thought.
But most people hate maths and this way of thinking. In contrast, you get first year students "re-discovering" OOP ever year - for instance a common trick to make them learn design patterns is just to put a problem that calls for it in front of them, and three times out of four in my experience they will even come up with a pattern name close to the original ones.
A lot of the time when you meet someone who had a bad experience with Lisp, if you interview them a bit, you soon discover it was actually Scheme.
Scheme twenty years ago, R5RS was even worse than now. It had nothing practical in the spec. No way to write a program consisting of multiple files. No error handling. R5RS talks about situations that trigger an "error", but nothing about how such a thing can be handled and recovered. Or how an error can be generated on purpose and then caught.
Anyone who studied R5RS in school was learning an utter piece of academic garbage; a serious regression from real Lisp.
The issue with the line of reasoning that “X language is bad because it was bad during an intro programming class” is that your experiences in that class do not generalize well. Sure, python might be better for writing some basic algorithm that you fully understand before writing a single line of code, and for fairly small codebases. However, try writing a large codebase and you’ll realize that, for example, managing state is really hard.
Sure, racket and other functional languages might require a greater learning curve than other languages, and of course they’re not the language of choice for performance critical applications (nor will Matthias Felleisen claim it is). However, as a systems developer who uses almost exclusively C++, I would argue that starting out with a language that forces you to think about your contracts, mutability, scope, etc, invariable create a better programmer down the line
Oh, and the deluge of useless parenthesis that it is, it hurts my eyes to read that code.
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).
Oh, how I wish I could share the joy I experience using Paredit with those parentheses. Paredit turns parentheses from an inconvenience into a turbo button for modifying code at an entirely new level of abstraction.
When you started coding, you probably used an editor that worked on units that were single characters. Think Notepad. Then maybe you learned a programmers editor like Emacs, Vim, or Atom or Sublime. There you learned to cut, copy, fold, spindle, and mutilate code in lines or paragraphs.
But Paredit... oh Paredit... now you have the tools to work with your code not in characters, lines, or paragraphs, but in code forms—the same stuff your code is made from.
And the best part is that Paredit doesn’t have to have a deep knowledge of your code, groping imperfectly like Intellisense. Paredit is deterministic and easy to implement.
If I could have an S-expression based version of every other language simply for paredit, I'd take it.
Now a story for a different day is how much I hate typing commas in non-lisps.
I did. Actually, when I found Python (some 20 years ago), I thought - "Here's it - Lisp for real world".
I can see it. I used to make a lot of money doing Python programming. About $40k a year more than I ever made doing C, Java, C# or C++. Of course, I did Python more recently, so there is the wage inflation between 1992 and today to consider. Still, you can make a lot writing Python code.
Also, some languages and applications require a higher degree of knowledge, training, and expertise than others. For example, I would expect to pay a programmer working in robotics more than I'd expect to pay a React or Angular developer.
Having grown up working in construction, I completely agree with your tool analogy though (and used the same analogy in another comment).
@gronne - About three times that, but close. ;)
Of course, some tools maybe more effective than others, but I still find sad measure in money terms any of them...
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 hit you at the right time, like whatever song was on the radio when you first fell in love.
Every step on our path is dear to us because it got us where we are today, but there are many many paths and little reason to want others to follow in our footsteps. If anything, we should discourage that because the world doesn't need another me or you. It's already got those.
I pity the MIT students that will waste so much of their intro course learning what is a vastly more complex language. There will be so many students that will struggle to learn python-specific topics that are irrelevant to learning the act of coding and may decide that CS and programming just aren't for them. Scheme is such a perfect language for this task because it puts so little between the student and the crucial experimentation phase that can instill a fascination/curiosity with programming. And now MIT students will miss out on that.
By this measure C should be a popular university intro language too, but it is famously unsuitable as a first language, at least according to academics.
Correct me if I'm wrong - I just went to an unrespected state school - but I would think that the MIT admissions filter selects for students who wouldn't particularly struggle with something as small as language idiosyncracies, especially in an introductory course.
I digressed a little. Point being: while I'm unsurprised that some % of people from a broader range of abilities couldn't get functions or iteration or inheritance or whathaveyou to stick, I'd be very surprised if ANY % of the culled-by-18 right end of the Bell curve couldn't grok both fundamental concepts and any relevant part of the standard documentation (on which we appear to be in agreement.)
I’m having flashbacks... Thanks for that ;)
Time complexity was my worst CS topic. At least, for implementing the most efficient system. I’m not an algorithms guy.
As someone who has been part of running intro courses using a variety of languages: While I like the Scheme path for various reasons, I do not recognize the effect you imagine at all from the students I've seen. That there are complex areas of Python is basically irrelevant for intro courses, the few pain points are really easy to explain and remember, and Python is great for the experimentation phase (the core is easy enough, the (standard) library ecosystem helps satisfying random interests and can generally also be used without being exposed to problematic parts of the language, REPL)
That being said, I did respect the course and the language. I didn’t understand the science part of computer science before starting the minor and that course opened my eyes pretty wide (as did the Data Structures course). It really forces you to think and understand what you were doing, much less poking and prodding (different from trial and error) than what you could do with Python and its libraries. Plus there’s significantly less information out there on it in comparison. I wouldn’t bring parents into it, they have almost no influence on universities unless they are privately funding/donating.
But my god those parentheses...
This is exactly what I look back on so fondly. I already had a lifetime of fiddling with libraries and stack overflow ahead of me, exploring pure computation was a completely eye-opening experience.
And so my use of Racket is simply as a dilettante. And I LOVE it. I have a lot of imposter syndrome and not really grokking data structures the way CS people can tell you the tradeoffs and implementation details of a B-tree. But, I LOVE coding in Racket when I get the chance.
For me, it’s a language where I can jank-hack things together like Python, but having more fun. Wonder if that’s because I never had the fun of Racket sullied by also having to learn data structures and CS fundamentals at the same time?
[1] https://htdp.org/ [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
Previous discussion on HN about the second addition:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14932552
EDIT: I feel like it is not all-encompassing but it is a good start. It is definitely unique in the concepts that it covers.
I vaguely recall one of the recent updates removed that limitation, but could be wrong about that.