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I have no argument there. But let's look at some actual data.

https://www.registrar.iastate.edu/resources/enrollment-stati...

In around 1995ish ISU moved to Scheme for their first level course, because they wanted to follow the MIT example.

At about 2000/2001 they had a healthy number of students in both the computer-science and pre-computer science programs. The problem you can see in the data is converting the pre-computer science majors to computer science. You can see that most just dropped.

Again you could say that maybe SICP should be a weed-out course, but the reality is, you can be a professional programmer without SICP. Yes SICP might be a nice to have for certain problem domains, but most people aren't functional programmers, and don't need to be.

Today, at ISU functional programming is a 300 level course, and the computer science program has 866 registered students for Fall of 2022.




I left out the fact that around 2007/2008ish (right around when SICP was phased out of MIT) Computer science enrollments dropped to ~100ish.




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