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0 pointsodyssey72y ago0 comments

Well, it's up to the reader to follow the implications. But the industry does hold sway in the design of university curricula, sometimes to the disappointment of academics, and this is nothing new.

For example, back in 2001, Dijkstra expressed his dismay at Java replacing a different functional programming language, Haskell, in UT Austin's introductory programming course. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs...

Also consider that MIT used the Scheme version of SICP as their introductory programming textbook for years, and it remains a classic, but nowadays MIT leans into Python for introductory programming courses.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

lll-o-lll2y ago· 2 in thread

You have been voted down, but this is 100% truth. I’d been a professional software developer for 10 years and programming since a young child when I stumbled across the MIT Scheme open course (this was nearly 10 years ago now). Learning Scheme as an exercise dramatically improved me as a software developer, as it is the near perfect teaching language. The fundamentals of most computer science concepts are so clearly laid out, with no distractions. I wish I’d had the exposure at a younger age!

MIT Scheme is pretty much useless as a practical language, vastly less useful than Python. Python is infinitely more powerful to actually “make things”. But this is not the point of University!

The academic languages are powerful for learning, and it is a huge shame that they are being replaced with “professionally relevant” languages.

bitwize2y ago

Real software engineering is a drudgery of stitching together other people's libraries and APIs, responding to the product team's "can't we just...?" queries, and alphabetizing your HTML properties. College doesn't prepare you for that. Shiny happy Schemeland doesn't prepare you for that. It's like the old joke about Bill Gates and the beta version of hell.

freilanzer2y ago

> College doesn't prepare you for that. Shiny happy Schemeland doesn't prepare you for that.

I see no problem with that. That's not what university should be about. They're not supposed to be software dev bootcamps for companies.

pvg2y ago· 1 in thread

Dijkstra was a great computer scientist who was also very generous with his expressions of dismay. You can find him expressing dismay over a great variety of topics not all of which have turned out to merit it in the long run.

ethanwillis2y ago

This says nothing about whether or not this specific instance of dismay is warranted. All you've said is a man can't be right 100% of the time which I don't find very useful.

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