On Tuesday, December 10, 2013 4:12:53 PM UTC+5:30, Oscar Benjamin wrote: > On 9 December 2013 19:57, Terry Reedy wrote: > > On 12/9/2013 7:23 AM, Oscar Benjamin wrote: > >> Hi all, > >> I work in a University Engineering faculty teaching, among other > >> things, programming. In our last meeting about improving our teaching > >> syllabus and delivery we've identified the first year programming > >> courses as an area where there is room for improvement and we're > >> considering (mainly on my suggestion) switching to using Python as the > >> first programming language that we use to introduce our students to > >> programming. I'm interested to know if anyone can share experience of > >> a similar situation or can point to any case studies about this. > > A few years ago, MIT switched from Scheme (which I believe originated at > > MIT) to Python for its first course. There might faculty blogs discussing > > the reasons.
> Thanks Terry. The best I've found is this: > http://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program/ There's this http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-did-mit-switch-from-scheme-to-python which seems to have died -- the internet archive has it here https://web.archive.org/web/20120429151818/http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-did-mit-switch-from-scheme-to-python Neither really talks of why python was chosen In that direction you may want to see why Java has been ousted from CMU: http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/teaching-fp-to-freshmen/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
