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Also, please keep in mind that the change is only the freshman core courses. The rest of the CS curriculum is the same as it has been for a long time, and it’s in those classes that we all learned about operating systems and new languages.

My son’s best friend’s older sister is a senior in CS at MIT now, and I’ve been hearing all about her experiences. It’s as if she’s following in my footsteps, which I find very entertaining. Of course they’re not my very own footsteps, but those of all the CS majors in the last thirty years. Of course the details have been updated; the new reading list for 6.033 is modern and very relevant.

6.033 is probably the deepest undergraduate CS course, dealing with issues that are leading-edge and often not entirely resolved yet. She sent me email when she was given a 6.033 paper of which I was one of the co-authors, namely our CACM paper about ObjectStore. Wow, I myself am on the 6.033 reading list — what an honor! Brag, brag. (It’s nothing to do with Lisp, by the way.)

I agree with you about how your myths never measure up to reality. I had the opportunity to meet Alan Kay at the Rebooting Computing summit held in January. I expected to be all giddy to meet him. Instead I felt very humble, but gratified. When he was talking with others about CS education he said something similar to Sussman with regard to who should be given diplomas, even more so who should be allowed to teach. I forget if it was at the Summit, but I’ve heard him quote Alan Turing who said that, “If you’re not satisfied with the computer you have, you can create one to your liking,” or something like that. Kay considers it essential that every CS graduate be able to write their own programming language, because he considered this to be like creating your own computer in a virtual sense. He also said that if any CS professor can’t do this they should be fired.

I understand what Sussman said about the reasons for the decision to make the switch. If I were in the CS department I’d feel uncomfortable about it. The reason being that it feels like MIT is slouching towards the undergrad CS education I had from a lesser known university, which was largely about algorithm analysis and optimization. This sort of education is perfect for doing what he describes: analyzing what already exists, and then piecing the best parts together into a cohesive whole in a performant manner. The problem is it doesn’t get at the lower level ideas. Who’s going to create the new APIs, operating systems, and languages? Certainly not the kind of people who had the CS education I had. It seems like we’re voluntarily taking ourselves out of the realm of computing innovation. “That’ll be done elsewhere.” Gee, I hope not!