I've heard this among other Course 6 students and alumni, and I think I understand your point of view, but I respectfully disagree.
Python is relevant to 90% of the jobs to which I've applied in my lifetime. In contrast, I've never seen any developer or manager mention Scheme seriously in a professional setting (just my honest experience), nor have I ever been asked in an interview about my experience with Scheme.
Python is extremely versatile, and works very well with many different design patterns. It offers a gentle-enough learning curve that you can teach it in the first part of a course, then turn around and use it as a platform to teach concepts in the second half of the course. 6.01 does this with robotics, for example.
MIT is often difficult for pointless reasons. Some of the professors are brilliant engineers but piss-poor educators. TA's don't all have the tact or capacity to tutor students about basic concepts. Python's simplicity, ubiquity, and large online community make it a perfect language for self-study, and time-constrained self-study is often a hallmark of an MIT education.
Most direct contact with educators in 6.01 doesn't involve the professor, but rather some other student who took the course a semester or two ago. For example, one idiot 6.01 TA of mine deleted two hours' worth my code from the course's Python environment (no CTRL+Z at the time) when I asked him to help me understand a concept, just because he didn't like something about the order in which I had written some computations. Then he said "do it again" and walked away. (I think he was from Russia; not sure if that's how education works over there.)
If that happens to you in a well-documented, community-supported language like Python or Java, you can go to someone else for help. With Scheme, you're kind of left without resources.
I'm all for challenges, but they should be reasonable and realistic, not contrived nor quirky-for-quirk's-sake.
Unlike you, I never took the 6.001 version, so I admit that I have a limited vantage point. But I think my logic here is not too far off.
Python is relevant to 90% of the jobs to which I've applied in my lifetime. In contrast, I've never seen any developer or manager mention Scheme seriously in a professional setting (just my honest experience), nor have I ever been asked in an interview about my experience with Scheme.
Python is extremely versatile, and works very well with many different design patterns. It offers a gentle-enough learning curve that you can teach it in the first part of a course, then turn around and use it as a platform to teach concepts in the second half of the course. 6.01 does this with robotics, for example.
MIT is often difficult for pointless reasons. Some of the professors are brilliant engineers but piss-poor educators. TA's don't all have the tact or capacity to tutor students about basic concepts. Python's simplicity, ubiquity, and large online community make it a perfect language for self-study, and time-constrained self-study is often a hallmark of an MIT education.
Most direct contact with educators in 6.01 doesn't involve the professor, but rather some other student who took the course a semester or two ago. For example, one idiot 6.01 TA of mine deleted two hours' worth my code from the course's Python environment (no CTRL+Z at the time) when I asked him to help me understand a concept, just because he didn't like something about the order in which I had written some computations. Then he said "do it again" and walked away. (I think he was from Russia; not sure if that's how education works over there.)
If that happens to you in a well-documented, community-supported language like Python or Java, you can go to someone else for help. With Scheme, you're kind of left without resources.
I'm all for challenges, but they should be reasonable and realistic, not contrived nor quirky-for-quirk's-sake.
Unlike you, I never took the 6.001 version, so I admit that I have a limited vantage point. But I think my logic here is not too far off.