It is fantastic that such lectures are being put online for the use of anyone.
We had barely adequate course notes, sometimes, and thats the way we liked it!
The technology of today is inspiring in the way it can distribute highly valuable information and education to the masses.
http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lec...
They're pretty awesome.
Another piece of trivia: Hal Abelson, the co-creator, was one of the big guys being 6.001's replacement (now in Python).
The new intro classes are in Python, which you could argue has the immediate benefit of being used in the world outside of MIT. They're also now more focused on learning while working towards project-style goals (like building a robot) instead of towards academic goals (like getting Scheme to do OOP).
Personally, I loved 6.001, but I'm the first to admit it was not for everyone, even people who could become great coders.
The same is true of 'sciences'.
Anyone here take them?
I still look back fondly on how '001 blew my mind lecture after lecture.
After the class was over I didn't use Scheme for another 10 years, but did everything in C. Scheme was just too slow in 1987. Both the language implementations and the hardware have come a long way. I use Scheme all the time now, and there are numerous popular languages, notably PHP and Ruby, that are slower than Scheme today.
I can see why old-timers think nothing's changed in the past couple decades sometimes.
But did anyone get a load of that old lisp machine? You could just feel how sluggish it must have been :-)
20 years on and things are much snappier! Thanks Intel and AMD!
