Same here. When I learned programming at UC Berkeley in the 90s, Scheme was the intro language. It was perfect precisely because it was so far from being the kind of language you'd use to engineer large projects. The first day, the professor spent less than half of the period introducing the entire syntax of the language...it's so damn simple. Beyond that, all learning was abstraction, problem solving and CS concepts. It was learning how to take a very limited set of primitives and construct a larger whole.
I pity the MIT students that will waste so much of their intro course learning what is a vastly more complex language. There will be so many students that will struggle to learn python-specific topics that are irrelevant to learning the act of coding and may decide that CS and programming just aren't for them. Scheme is such a perfect language for this task because it puts so little between the student and the crucial experimentation phase that can instill a fascination/curiosity with programming. And now MIT students will miss out on that.
I pity the MIT students that will waste so much of their intro course learning what is a vastly more complex language. There will be so many students that will struggle to learn python-specific topics that are irrelevant to learning the act of coding and may decide that CS and programming just aren't for them. Scheme is such a perfect language for this task because it puts so little between the student and the crucial experimentation phase that can instill a fascination/curiosity with programming. And now MIT students will miss out on that.