[TUHS] ratfor vibe

Win Treese treese at acm.org
Wed Feb 2 07:50:49 AEST 2022


> On Feb 1, 2022, at 1:19 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> From: Clem Cole
> 
>> So by the late 70s/early 80s, [except for MIT where LISP/Scheme reigned]
> 
> Not quite. The picture is complicated, because outside the EECS department,
> they all did their own thing - e.g. in the mid-70's I took a programming
> intro couse in the Civil Engineering department which used Fortran. But in
> EECS, in the mid-70's, their intro programming course used assembler
> (PDP-11), Algol, and LISP - very roughly, a third of the time in each. Later
> on, I think it used CLU (hey, that was MIT-grown :-). I think Scheme was used
> later. In both of these cases, I have no idea if it was _only_ CLU/Scheme, or
> if they did part of it in other languages.

I took 6.001 (with Scheme) in the spring of 1983, which was using a course
handout version of what became Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs by Sussman and Abelson. My impression was that it had been
around for a year before that, but not much more, and it was part of
revamping the EECS core curriculum at the time.

In at least the early 80s, CLU was used in 6.170, Software Engineering
Laboratory, in which a big project was writing a compiler.

And Fortran was still being taught for the other engineering departments.
In 1982(ish), those departments had the Joint Computing Facility for a lot
of their computing, of which the star then was a new VAX 11/782.

- Win



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