Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

posteriorscience.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 245 posts

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#41

Post by Animats »

"Programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. Some of which works. This leads to what I call ritual-taboo programming. People follow the rituals and avoid things they're told to avoid. This is reflected in programming books. Programming books were once reference manuals, which listed each function and what it did. Now, they're enormous compendiums of examples.

It's sad, but MIT made the right decision. MIT used to produce people who designed elegant, perfect little jewels of code. There just aren't many jobs for those people. Algorithm design just isn't that big a deal any more. Most of the useful ones have been written and are in libraries. Who reads Knuth any more?

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#42

Post by dnautics »

yolesaber wrote: post #20
dnautics wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is going to sound crazy, but in eighth grade I took a CS class where they had us create an interpreter in lisp. It was amazing, and I haven't done anything quite like it since (though dan boneh's crypto class on coursera was close).

That sounds fun! Lisp is great for that because of its code-as-data principle (I use clojure in my day job and it makes dealing with structured data like JSON an absolute breeze). Did you go to an advanced school or something?

well, i started coding in 1st grade (logo, then basic) but this was a summer program hosted by Johns Hopkins. It was highly theoretical - we learned about DFAs, NFAs, epsilon-NFAs, and turing machines.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#43

Post by sedachv »

gshulegaard wrote: post #31
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #9

I'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…

In the context of the class (The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs), I feel like this is not such an outlandish view. It sounds to me like the field of software engineering has simply evolved since the 80s. Don't get me wrong, if you are going for post-graduate studies such a course will always be relevant, but it sounds like he is talking within the context of undergraduates. And in the context of un…

> It sounds to me like the field of software engineering has simply evolved since the 80s.

What is ridiculous in the face of this "programming by experimentation" fantasy is that programming has evolved since the 1980s... to be even more about composable abstractions with provable semantics. Hindley-Milner-Damas types and monads are now everywhere.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#45

Post by sitkack »

> “More like science.

ummm, I hardly see anyone and by anyone I mean even people > 20 years of experience doing empirical research while solving problems. Maybe the _like_ needs more emphasis? We don't really teach science or the design of experiments. This is arguably the most important intellectual tool we have ever developed and it should be the core of all education.

Programming by poking that I see folks doing, isn't science. It is stabbing in the dark until something appears to work. There is more to computational thinking that throwing some APIs together in a blender and making a cool demo.

As a longtime Python programmer, I wish more people would start with Scheme. Most Python is written like some dynamically typed Java; people are using maybe 30% of the power of the language.

I really wish I could have experienced those SICP lectures in 86.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#46

Post by lisper »

mindcrime wrote: post #39
lisper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the reason it has changed for everyone is that no one understands the fundamentals any more, because they aren't being taught to anyone. The ecosystem is thus becoming infested by horrible hacks which kinda-sorta work, and which everyone uses, because they kinda sorta work, and there is nothing else. The idea that programmers need to understand how to "program by poking" thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophe…

The ecosystem is thus becoming infested by horrible hacks which kinda-sorta work, and which everyone uses, because they kinda sorta work, and there is nothing else. Yes, but the reason it has changed for everyone is that no one understands the fundamentals any more, because they aren't being taught to anyone. I mostly agree with both of these statements, but with a slight twist. To some extent, I feel like the reason…

> no one has time to learn everything

Nonsense. The fundamentals don't take a long time to learn. And once you know them, everything else becomes much easier to learn. That's the reason that learning the fundamentals matters: it's a huge lever.

Here's a single, small, very accessible book that takes you all the way from switches to CPUs:

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

SICP gets you from CPUs to Scheme (well, it goes in the other direction, but the end result is the same). That's two books to get from switches to compilers. Anyone who thinks they don't have time for that needs to learn to manage their time better.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#47

Post by chubot »

yolesaber wrote: post #4
stepvhen wrote: post #2

All that said, it is still worthwhile to work through all of SICP, if you want a deeper understanding of how certain tools work. Writing your own interpreter is a very rewarding experience.

Having to write my own shell in C for my operating systems class absolutely blew my mind. And then after that my professor made us implement a quine in the shell we just wrote. Yes, he was insane.

Which class/university was it? Any chance the materials are online?

I'm actually writing my own shell now; I'd be interested to compare :)

The fork/exec/pipe/dup calls are definitely an unusual and powerful paradigm. I think too many programmers don't know this because we were brainwashed to make "portable" programs, and that's the least portable part of Unix.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#48

Post by three-cups »

mattlong wrote: post #23

I 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...

I first read SICP 10 years into my programming career. I felt like that was a good point to read the book. Any earlier and much of it would have been lost on me. But maybe this is the kind of book that you read and re-read and always find new things.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#49

Post by yolesaber »

dnautics wrote: post #42
yolesaber wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds fun! Lisp is great for that because of its code-as-data principle (I use clojure in my day job and it makes dealing with structured data like JSON an absolute breeze). Did you go to an advanced school or something?

well, i started coding in 1st grade (logo, then basic) but this was a summer program hosted by Johns Hopkins. It was highly theoretical - we learned about DFAs, NFAs, epsilon-NFAs, and turing machines.

Awesome! I started in the 5th grade with Perl (lol) and went to a bunch of summer programs but they were more hands-on and programming based. Very cool. I learned about state machines when I was 16 and would draw my own really complicated ones for fun haha.
Post reply on HN