by so-cal-schemer | 2025-08-02 13:59:33+00:00
Hal Abelson

InfiniteHistoryProject MIT (2011)

https://youtu.be/r8k8o7zkA1o?t=2689

INTERVIEWER: How has introductory curriculum in EECS changed since that time? I mean clearly it's--

ABELSON: Oh, it's changed a lot.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

ABELSON: I don't know. People keep using the phrase bittersweet. It's changed in style. So what happened in the department is the department kind of decided that the way students get introduced into the department should become more horizontal and less vertical, by which I mean when you go into the department before the new curriculum, there were a bunch of very intellectually deep courses. So 6.001 really is a deep course in software engineering. And then the idea was well, you shouldn't actually do that because if students want to think about what they want to major in, they ought to get an experience that's a lot more broad. So they should learn not only about software, but something about circuits and something about signal processing and all that. So 6.001 sort of didn't fit into that world. I sort was on the committee. I had this funny feeling. I sort of loved the course. But I also had this feeling that the course needed to change. And both Gerry and I felt that as long as we were part of it, it wasn't going to change. And in fact we consciously got out of it. We had an official, what you call passing of the baton ceremony in one of the lectures where Bob Fano was there as the originator of this, who let us do 6.001. And then Eric Grimson and Duane Boning were there. They were going to take it over. And we kind of officially passed the baton. And we said we now did this in front of 350 student witnesses. We are never going to teach this course again. The department can't ask us. But then what happened is even after we got out of it, the course didn't change as much. And we can flatter ourselves and say well, the ideas were just really great. But sometimes you just need a kick in the pants to go someplace else. So this new department curriculum structure turned out to be the kick in the pants. And so I was part of the group, along with Leslie Kaelbling and Jacob White and Tomas Lozano-Perez, who sort of designed sort of the new course, which consciously was not about 6.001. But a lot of the biggest themes of 6.001 about extraction and modularity and the way you express things, they carry over into the new course. But the new course is also doing robotics. And it's thinking that signal processing. And there's even some stuff about circuits. So it's not a deep course in that sense. And there's a lot of people who have come through MIT--I don't want to take credit for 6.001 and that, but I want to say it was a very deep experience in how you think of software--who criticized what we did. And they say they really miss it. They talk about their own intellectual development as programmers. It was just profoundly influenced by that kind of very--we would sit in that class and talk about the philosophy sometimes. The new course does not do that in the same way. On the other hand, you have to sort of ask what's the population you're serving? And the fact that you talk to the minority of students who really, really glommed on to our way of thinking and they say, gee, we really wish MIT were still doing that. I don't know what the right way of serving the most students are. But in any case we're just doing something rather different in motivation now.

INTERVIEWER: So it's broader, but less deep.

ABELSON: And very consciously less deep.