Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!crcraig
From: crcraig@athena.mit.edu (Christopher R Craig)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
Message-ID: <13419@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 11 Aug 89 12:33:13 GMT
References: <4218@portia.Stanford.EDU> <4200022@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: crcraig@athena.mit.edu (Christopher R Craig)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 30

In article <4200022@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:

>I think I said this, but it makes good sense to pick a language that
>will be reused in upper level courses.  Clearly LISP is a great choice
>for MIT, since one upper-level AI course is required, several other
>AI-type course are "restricted electives", and students might do UROP
>(undergrad research), or write their UG thesis in LISP.
>
>MIT didn't have this good sense.  They tried to teach a compiler
>course without requiring the students to know the implementation
>language.  It's hard to learn 2 new languages and also compiler
>technology in one semester!

I don't know when this was, but it certainly is no longer the case.
The laboratory portion of 6.035 is done in CLU, which we had to learn
in 6.170 (software engineering laboratory).

Back to the "6.001 is biased towards AI people" debate.  I don't
really agree with that.  I've got my old problem sets too, and they
don't look that bad.  Is an adventure "game" an AI hack?  How about
impelementing run-time type checking in the metacircular evaluator?
If you ask me, the problem sets just reinforce the abstraction and
computational concepts that Abelson & Sussman teaches.

All I know is, 6.001 didn't make me want to become an AI person.  No
way.  Not a chance :-)

----------------------------------------
Chris Craig                      MIT '89
crcraig@athena.mit.edu