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Comment by abstractbill | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I think I actually agree with the overall point. I got my first experience of programming using BASIC to get various Sinclair computers to paint stuff on the screen and make funny beeping noises. I'm all for instant gratification.

On the other hand that was when I was 9. By 12 I was learning Lisp, and by college age I'd written my own little Lisp compiler.

I've always had this image of MIT students that doesn't quite mesh with them needing a gentle introduction to programming, but maybe that's not really the case?

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> I've always had this image of MIT students that doesn't quite mesh with them needing a gentle introduction to programming, but maybe that's not really the case?

If it leads to more (non-CS) students taking a programming class, I'd call it a big win. Other fields can benefit greatly from programming skills. I'd almost go as far as calling it a new form of literacy.

Absolutely I'd call it a new form of literacy. The most impressive applications of computer science always happen outside the realm of computer science disciplines.

"I've always had this image of MIT students that doesn't quite mesh with them needing a gentle introduction to programming, but maybe that's not really the case?"

6.001 from my experience does not in any way imply a student's focus on computer programming or software development. I've heard horror stories about people in completely unrelated majors ending up in that class and having their brains thoroughly melted. In my personal opinion, Python will be considerably more humane in that department.

There are probably a lot of physics, math and engineering students taking intro to programming that haven't written a line of code before.

I'd assume most, if not all, computer science students have, but there's still a difference from learning to bang out some code in high school that does neat things, vs. starting back at the beginning and approaching it as, well, computer science.

The way my university covered it was doing Pascal for the intro courses (this was the mid-90s) and then in third-semester "Programming Languages" we worked mostly in Scheme implementing language fundamentals. That seemed to be a reasonable balance.

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