As someone who took the Scheme version and is now teaching the Python version, there are without a doubt aspects of the course I miss. The old Scheme course just had a kind of elegance to it.
We are still striving to teach the same material, just in a different language. This class is not at all a class about Python, just as the old course was not a class about Scheme. The course content is almost the same: functional programming, data abstraction and data structures, OOP, interpreters, parallel and distributed computing, declarative programming.
We have unfortunately had to sacrifice some great aspects of the original class, eg. the metacircular evaluator. The hope is that in exchange we have a more natural OOP system, better support for parallel and network computing packages, and much more modern implementations of distributed computing.
[disclaimer: these are my own opinions, I do not speak for the department]
We are still striving to teach the same material, just in a different language. This class is not at all a class about Python, just as the old course was not a class about Scheme. The course content is almost the same: functional programming, data abstraction and data structures, OOP, interpreters, parallel and distributed computing, declarative programming.
We have unfortunately had to sacrifice some great aspects of the original class, eg. the metacircular evaluator. The hope is that in exchange we have a more natural OOP system, better support for parallel and network computing packages, and much more modern implementations of distributed computing.
[disclaimer: these are my own opinions, I do not speak for the department]