Waterloo using Scheme for 1st Year Computer Science
23 Mar 2008First-year computer science courses at the University of Waterloo will undergo a major revision in fall 2008. CS at UW is part of the Faculty of Mathematics, and all Math students (including not only CS and traditional Math students, but accountants, actuaries, statisticians, and many others) take two courses in CS as part of their core requirements, but they have typically had a choice of courses depending on interest and experience. For the first time in fall 2008, all of the first-term courses will use the programming language Scheme.
I realize that Waterloo isn’t the first University to take this tact but it’s probably the highest profile school in Canada to do so. It’ll be interesting to see if it rubs off on other schools and we start to see a bit less emphasis on Java as a teaching language.