kaapi1

They do interpreters for Logo instead, and wow... not even 6.001 at MIT did the register and bytecode stuff.

Full disclosure: I've known John (the instructor) for 3 years, and I'm a TA for this course right now. On the other hand, I was also 'born' Scheme at MIT (which has also switched to Python).

I can confirm that moving to Python was a very well-reasoned decision. Having TA'd the Scheme version of the same course 2 or 3 times, I can say that for all talk of Scheme having very simple syntax, it's surprisingly hard for students to get used to.

- The code is hard to read, and, a humans, we're not built for nested expressions.

- Useful data structures, like key-value stores, and indexable lists, are limited, or introduced late

- Having recursion thrown at you in week 1, before you've learned basic debugging, the concept of abstraction, or how to write readable code, gets in the way of learning to program.

- Almost nobody uses scheme.

But they can do such cool projects! Mining twitter data? Seriously?

http://wla.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa11/projects/trends/trends.h...