http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-quarterly/2011/hal-abelson/
the paragraph he says it in is:
> It’s just a different course. We could have done it in Scheme and I sort of wish we had. And for random reasons we didn’t. But the thing that ties it together—if you had fifteen seconds to describe the whole course—it’s still about abstraction and modularity. The beginning of that course is not very different from the beginning of 6.001 other than you do it in Python. But at that point, where you’re not building interpreters yet, you can pretty much do this stuff in Python. You have to contend with Python’s broken notion of lambda but other than that it’s not really that different.
he mentions it as an aside really, but the overall interview itself is very good. abelson is a treat to listen to.
as explained in the interview, the course changed to python because the course itself changed. they basically killed off the old course and created new courses built around their new degree program structure. the new course hits a lot of different aspects of electrical, computer, and software engineering, many of which heavily use existing libraries, so they seemed to pick python for this.
in my opinion, they could have easily written libraries in another language, so i suspect there were some politics at MIT that lead to the decision to use python.
Can you give a link? I'd be interested to read it.