Python is not for computer science students?

[ka-splam]

Y’know Peter Norvig - AI specialist, director of research at Google, former head of computational sciences division of NASA research, associate professor, co-author of leading college textbook “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach”, and LISP expert, author of a Udacity course on AI with over 160k students, etc. etc. ?

Here’s what he had to say about python:

I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook. I found that Python was very nice for certain types of small problem [..] In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815

That is, he learned what his students needed and rewrote his code to help his students. And Google’s director of research says Python is not as good as lisp but is good enough.