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From: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Object oriented languages (MIT vs Hahvahd)
Message-ID: <2123@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 21-Jun-84 00:29:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.2123
Posted: Thu Jun 21 00:29:44 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 15-Jun-84 00:36:39 EDT
References: <1979@mit-eddie.UUCP> <268@harvard.UUCP> <2115@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Reply-To: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 22

The difference between the introductory programming courses at MIT and
Hahvahd probably has very little to do with the languages they use.  It
is more probably related to the philosophy of the curriculum, which
Nessus implied.  It is really wrong to call 6.001 ((born of 6.031 and
6.912) an "introductory programming course."  Unless it has changed
radically in the 3 or 4 years since I took it, it probably should not be
taken by students with no prior computer programming experience.  In
fact, it was very helpful to already know Lisp (I took it the year
before they switched to Scheme).  The name of this course is "Structure
and Interpretation of Computer Programs", and in it you are taught
programming *ideas*, not programming languages.  The course notes
included a reference manual on the Lisp dialect we used, and the
professors briefly went over Lisp programming for the first week or two,
but from then on you were expected to be able to program anything you
had to.

This philosophy pervaded the entire MIT Computer Science curriculum, and
it is the reason that I am so happy I went there.
-- 
			Barry Margolin
			ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics
			UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar