Python slams into its exponential wall

My first Python sighting was around 1999, in the part of the building where the hackers hang out. Somebody had a poster on the door saying something like If you would have used Python, then you would have been done by now.

Next stop 2005. Since 1986 I had been a fan of “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” by Harold Abelson and Gerald Sussman. At the University of Waterloo it was only in a fourth-year topics course that this book could make a brief appearance. I was envious of MIT, where masses of first-year students took EECS 6.001, where Abelson and Sussman was used from day one. That was class. In 2005 I heard the sad news that, after two glorious decades, EECS 6.001 was closed down, replaced by a course where the text was … a book written for high-school students. Maybe EECS wouldn’t have picked that book if its language would have been BASIC. Perhaps it had to do with the book’s choice of Python. It was from this news item that I learned that Python is a programming language.