What is HtDP?
Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
#22SICP gets challenging in the very first chapter. You should aim to do about 1/3rd of the exercises, knowing that you can come back and do more later. The first chapter will certainly improve your ability to reason about recursive code. If you lose motivation later in the book (like I did), you will still have gained something.
This.
I wish I learned it earlier in my life. Before I realized what you said, I procrastinated on so many books and never started many I wanted to read.
After I realized this, I finished way more books, and learned many new things even when I didn't finish books. You don't need to finish books to learn new things that make you better.
Even you read four chapters of a book, you are still those four chapters wiser than yourself who hadn’t read those four chapters.
Re: Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
#23SICP is an amazing book that will make you a better programmer, but might not help you with the task of writing better professional Python programs. If you aspire to understand computing systems from first-principles, there's no better resource that SICP. I've read it multiple times and I learn something new each time. Do the exercises too!
> but might not help you with the task of writing better professional Python programs
Let me disagree here: right now I’m doing mentoring with some python programmers where I work, they watch the videos, read the relevant part of the book, and we have a discussion together after each part. I hear constantly “oh yeah, I can apply that here or there”, “this streams concept is so good”, etc etc etc. I think it is most valuable if your background is “only” Algol family languages.
Re: Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
#24Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming is also a great book.
This is a hardcore book.
Re: Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
#25Background: SICP was the textbook for my undergrad intro to CS class, though I was already a self-taught programmer at the time. SICP provided a different way of understanding programming. I enjoyed the class, did well, and became a big fan of Scheme for quite some time. But the text was written for a different era, one dominated by C, PASCAL, and COBOL and when parallel programming was rare. In a time where almost a…
aside from the fact SICP now has a javascript edition, if you pick a book that focuses on whatever random modern javascript/python programming language you're not really studying anything like the material in SICP.
SICP is more like studying the actual composition of wood itself than it is about tools. this is still important whether youre using new or old tools.
Re: Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your only critique is that SICP is old. Computing power and performance are irrelevant to SICP.
Not only that. Now precisely because multicore is the only path to follow when we reach the end of the Moore’s law, we need more than ever functional programming. Is no coincidence that there are so much new languages that are trying to use those concepts, including a big revival of Lisp.
There's a big revival of lisp?
Re: Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
#27SICP is a great and mind-expanding book; but I came to it fairly late, at a time when (I think, I hope) I was already decent at "elegant" programming, so it's hard for me to say if it'd help you program elegantly. Probably, but I don't think that's one of its chief concerns.
On the other hand - HtDP is explicitly focused on teaching you patterns of thought that will help you create well-structured programs. It's also significantly easier, so I'd recommend it for your purposes full-throatedly.
Re: Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
#28A great book by one of the auhors of HtDP is DCIC and it uses a programmimg language called Pyret and chapter 3 covers a transition from pyret to python.
https://dcic-world.org/2023-02-21/index.html
Do you have any examples you can share of GPT4 being degraded?
Re: Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
#29Since, astonishingly, neither full title is mentioned in the post or the comments: SICP = Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b... HtDP = How to Design Programs: https://htdp.org/ Sometimes I think gratuitous use of acronyms (initialisms for the pedants) has been the biggest impediment to learning throughout my career.
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Re: Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?
#30not worth