[lamerose]

Preferable to doing the Javascript edition of SICP.

[odyssey7]

Alas, the focus is on optimizing job placement at graduation, so intellectually engaging choices are lower priority. We’re in a situation where CS departments are incentivized to spend every year that a student is in school optimizing their ability to produce BFS or DFS in Python within 15 minutes.

[epgui]

Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like you're making a general statement from a very specific and personal situation?

[nxobject]

Sadly true - I majored in math in college and had no plans of going into a programming-heavy job, so I was able to take fun “applied” CS classes like a “language grand tour” or physically based rendering, but skip core classes with those pressures like algorithms etc. entirely.

[lamerose]

Not a fan of Python, but it isn't too bad pedagogically speaking. JS on the other hand... I hope WASM can one day kill it, leave it obsolete, and have it forcefully deprecated like Flash.

[bjoli]

Ihave been using guile extensively for a couple of years. It has destroyed writing recursive functions in other languages for me. There are no stack overflows in guile, and a recursive function won't fail until you have used all a avilable memory. This lets you write very elegant functions in places where the state is a tree or a linear data structure. Doing the same in python means having to actually deal with state. It just feels so unnecessary and error prone.