What I lament here is not the fate of 6001 specifically. It probably was outdated and in need of a refresh of some sort. What I lament here is the rationale that Sussman gives and apparently buys into, that the new approach is acceptable, and it's acceptable because treating things as magic black boxes is an inherent feature of modern engineering. No one understands, no one can even be expected to understand, and that's Just The Way It Is, and it's OK.
Well, no, it's not OK. People can and must be expected to understand because the magic black boxes aren't actually magic. They were created by mere mortals not that long ago, some of whom went to MIT and read SICP. If SICP is dated (and it is) the thing to do is to update and improve it, not to discard it.
“Give people tools to do shit” does not preclude “learning all the details”. And it’s not the last class people take!
The early lessons of SICP are more like teaching what's 2+2 in my opinion (substition model of function application, for example).
In terms of practicality of the content, honestly I'd say SICP was at least as bad as most intro lectures I've seen, and honestly should stay but be combined with something like companion labs with "battery included" builds to play with things.
It's hard to imagine the EECS program does not still require this material to earn a BS in CS or EE, but requiring four prerequisite courses probably interfered with non-EECS students who wanted to take junior/senior level EECS courses but did not want to have to run the "gauntlet of four" before doing so.
Now there is a generation of software engineers worried about losing their jobs to ChatGPT because they resigned to the fact that ChatGPT can probably glue things together better than they can long before they do the necessary work to understand ChatGPT from first principles. But this is branded as elitism, highly anti-bureaucratic.
Ask somebody at DeepMind exactly how AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol. At the end of the conversation, you will get a blank look. Don't even bother asking what inspired SD or DALL-E to generate a particular image.
In many ways SICP was from the same intellectual tradition as New Math.
To be sure, I also did math contests in high school to bump up my speed at math, and in software will do timed speed tests (self devised on certain types of small tasks) also to bump up my speed in a particular language.
They had arithmetic first. People counted chickens, sheep, coins first. Then, mathematicians invented more abstract rules that incidentally were able to derive arithmetic, and called them "first" principles. Chronologically they came last.
This is less about the French having too high standards and more about the French not understanding how people learn, especially children of ordinary ability and interest in mathematics.
They followed trendy, hyper-abstract, superficially sophisticated theories - as they tend to do in many arenas - and now their students score the worst in the EU, and the French education minister has removed it from the common core high school curriculum. https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/france-in-focus/2022052...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Lichnerowicz
tl;dr: New Math began in France, and they were the first to recover from it.
Instead they do what most people do: they teach concepts with a lot of papering over of the details. Then, once people have a stronger grasp on things, they go into first principles. It’s easier to understand commutativity if you can do addition already!
Similarly, you can teach people black box stuff at first, then dive into details. it’s ok to use a high level language before understanding how to run stuff on a machine.
Let’s not forget something important: Python and Lisp are basically abstracting away the important machinery anyways! Sussman has said it himself, computer science is about computers the same way that astronomy is about telescopes.
And of course it’s not like SICP is the only class all these people are taking. One intro class. Meanwhile people get to do fun and engaging shit while learning. And they will learn more stuff later!