The interesting bit is that the original author's no longer feel that SICP is the right way to approach programming any more. In their words, we've moved to 'programming by poking' and hence the latest incarnation of the course uses python and not LISP.
"The interesting bit is that the original author's no longer feel that SICP is the right way to approach programming any more."
I think it's more accurate to say that they didn't see a reason to require engineers to learn CS. The class is now completely different. Why python? Not because it's a good programming language, but because there was a library the students could call to control a robot, which was the new goal of the class, not programming.
Here's the quote:
You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course.
So the good thing about the new 6.001 was that it was robot-centered — you had to program a little robot to move around. And robots are not like resistors, behaving according to ideal functions. Wheels slip, the environment changes, etc — you have to build in robustness to the system, in a different way than the one SICP discusses.
And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all.
I believe you're referring to the fact that MIT's intro class for EECS was changed from scheme to python. This was not a translation but instead the intro curriculum as a whole was re-designed. 6.01 isn't really an incarnation of 6.001. It does reflect a "programming by poking" approach in that it does not try to have the students build their understanding from a set of core axioms. Instead, students add/modify code within an overall framework. I took 6.01 in the fall of 2008 and found that this it less feels conceptually satisfying but does indeed bear a closer resemblance resemble real-life programming. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
I never took the original 6.001, so my comparison point is actually a stripped-down reincarnation of the original course which is taught by alumni volunteers during the January IAP term. http://web.mit.edu/benmv/6.001/6.184/website/
