Did SICP at Berkeley. Really awesome course. Thanks MIT for not teaching it anymore. Makes me a better programmer than your new grads now. Hah!
Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
21–30 of 245 posts
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#22Eh. Many students will have the rest of their lives to perfect the art of poking at a library. Getting the chance to play with the more sublime CS stuff is much harder outside of university.
the only thing that makes it harder is lack of time. but then that problem exists in university too. with one you can work on your own schedule during limited free time, and with the other you can devote a lot of time to it but it's on someone else's timeline.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#23I really wish SICP had been a 2nd year course (with a requisite increase in difficulty) instead of my very first course in the EECS department. Not having had a ton of background in programming beforehand, I feel that a lot of what SICP has to offer was lost on me to some degree due my not appreciating it at the time.
I suppose the same could probably be said for any intro course or just college in general...
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#24> Sussman admitted that the SICP curriculum was “more coherent” than what they have now and that they still don’t know what the right curriculum should be.
The article should have led with this because I believe it would have framed the rest of it more accurately.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#25I really wish SICP had been a 2nd year course (with a requisite increase in difficulty) instead of my very first course in the EECS department. Not having had a ton of background in programming beforehand, I feel that a lot of what SICP has to offer was lost on me to some degree due my not appreciating it at the time. I suppose the same could probably be said for any intro course or just college in general...
My university used to have an Engineering Fundamentals class that all Engineering students were required to take their first year. Among several other things, it taught how to use Excel and more importantly, programming using Fortran. It wasn't in-depth, but you learned what programming was in a pretty easy environment.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#26I still swear by SICP and TAOCP for anyone who wants to learn CS seriously.
For working as a professional programmer, SICP, sure. But TAOCP? Why?
I wrote that for anyone interested in learning CS seriously, I swear by those two books.
I would recommend an entirely different set of books for someone who wants to work as a professional programmer.
That being said, TAOCP really gave me a clear understanding of algorithmic analysis. It's a hard book, but after you finish it, you won't look at programming the same way again. Especially when it comes to design decisions for systems where efficiency is a must.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#27I'm surprised and a bit dismayed to read Sussman's reasoning: "...Sussman said that in the 80s and 90s, engineers built complex systems by combining simple and well-understood parts. The goal of SICP was to provide the abstraction language for reasoning about such systems. Today, this is no longer the case. Sussman pointed out that engineers now routinely write code for complicated hardware that they don’t fully unde…
Calling it his "reasoning" with all the connotations that come with that word goes way too far.
This was his polite implicit criticism of the new core, which among other things also teaches much less in the way of EE fundamentals, a topic he's cared about very much since at least the late '70s (i.e. 6.002 is no longer a required course for all EECS majors).
The bottom line is that in the post-dot.com crash panic which saw MIT EECS enrollment drop by more than half, after it had been steady at 40% of the undergraduates for decades, one result was "MIT" deciding that what a MIT EECS degree meant would be substantially different.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#28Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#29I really wish SICP had been a 2nd year course (with a requisite increase in difficulty) instead of my very first course in the EECS department. Not having had a ton of background in programming beforehand, I feel that a lot of what SICP has to offer was lost on me to some degree due my not appreciating it at the time. I suppose the same could probably be said for any intro course or just college in general...
My university used to have an Engineering Fundamentals class that all Engineering students were required to take their first year. Among several other things, it taught how to use Excel and more importantly, programming using Fortran. It wasn't in-depth, but you learned what programming was in a pretty easy environment.
We had a similar freshman pan-engineering course at Texas A&M that taught both excel and fortran among other things. Probably the most practically useful course in the entire program.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#30I really wish SICP had been a 2nd year course (with a requisite increase in difficulty) instead of my very first course in the EECS department. Not having had a ton of background in programming beforehand, I feel that a lot of what SICP has to offer was lost on me to some degree due my not appreciating it at the time. I suppose the same could probably be said for any intro course or just college in general...
In Math, you take Calculus. It's four semesters. Then you take Real Analysis which is the exact same material all over again, but you actually learn it and prove the theorems instead of just memorizing a few formulas and blindly applying them.
It's the same in Economics where you take Micro and Macro and then junior or senior year you do the same all over again but this time you take it seriously with logical reasoning instead of just memorizing a couple stock phrase explanations.
SICP wants to be both. It's a great book so maybe it can do both. But it's hard for a class to do both.