That's a shame because the theoretical grounding that comes from SICP is enough of a clue to tell you why black box library X is crashing, runs too slow, lacks feature Y, etc. and maybe even enough of a clue to help you modify/hack it to get feature Z as a workaround.
Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
51–60 of 245 posts
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#52If you haven't watched the SICP video lectures [1], they are really great.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> learn everything all the way from NAND and NOR gates, up to 7400 series IC's, to microprocessors, to assembly language, to C (portable assembly), to operating systems internals, to TCP/IP, HTTP internals, to HTML, and ultimately to Javascript, and also including a side order of databases, filesystems, machine learning/AI, etc. It's called a Computer Engineering degree, sometimes called EECS (as at MIT). I did it an…
It's called a Computer Engineering degree, sometimes called EECS (as at MIT). I did it and you can too.
And by your own admission you didn't learn all the stack elements I listed above. And that was not in any way, shape, form, or fashion an exhaustive list!
Sure, if you finish a four year degree in CS/EE/EECS you learn a lot of stuff... and if you spend a big chunk of that four years on the really low level stuff, you have to tradeoff time spent on higher levels of the stack. You can only pour so much water in a 1 gallon bucket.
And even then, you only get the fundamentals are a certain level of depth. At some point, one has to ask "how important is it that I be able to go out, buy an 8088 chip, a memory controller chip, a floppy drive controller chip, etc., solder a motherboard together, code an OS in assembly, write my own text editor, etc, etc., etc."
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against teaching the fundamentals, and I'm not even sure I agree with MIT's decision on this. But I will say I can understand it and cede that it has some merit.
And all of that said, I'll go back to what I said earlier.. to me, the important thing is to continue learning even after college, including going back to fundamentals like building circuits from individual transistors and what-not. That stuff has value, you there's no reason to think you can't be productive even without that.
I mean, if you think about it, every field eventually segments into layers where certain practitioners treat some things as a black box. Does an engineer building a car also need to be a metallurgist or materials scientist? No, he/she just grabs a book, and looks up the parameters for the correct material for the application at hand. Etc.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you expand on the last sentence. I'm not sure I understand what you were trying to express. (not trolling, genuinely curious)
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fr…
Yes, learning the fundamentals is a huge lever. I absolutely agree. But I still stand by the assertion that "no one has time to learn everything" - especially at the beginning of their career.
As the old saying goes "if I had 3 days to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first 2.5 days sharpening my axe". Sure, but at some point you have to actually start chopping. By analogy, at some point you have to quit worrying about fundamentals and learn the "stuff" you need to actually build systems in the real world.
By and large I'm in favor of spending a lot of time on fundamentals, and being able to reason things out from first principles. And when I was younger, I thought that was enough. But the longer I do this stuff, and the larger the field grows, the more I have to concede that, for some people, some of the time, it's a smart tradeoff to spend more of their time on the "get stuff done" stuff.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#56I 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...
At my university it was a 3rd or 4th year course (depending on how quickly you were able to knock out the prereqs), and I think that was a great approach. At that point you've used programming languages enough that creating your own interpreter is a fascinating experience.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#57Reading this made me so so sad, I do agree with the reasoning.
I learned to program on a course that follows SICP, I spent all my college years learning how to program from first principles, building all the pieces from scratch. Building compilers, soft threads implementations, graph parsing algorithms... and I was happy with that way of programming!
Today I'm an iOS developer, I spend most of my day 'poking' at the Cocoa Touch framework whose source I can't even read because it's closed source. The startup I work for moves so fast that I'm forced to use other peoples open source projects without even having the time to read the source. I feel miserable doing the kind of programming I do nowadays! I wish I could go back to simpler times, where I actually had to reason about algorithms, data structures, hardware, etc...
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#58I'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…
MIT grad here: Nope. I've never had a workday that didn't involve reading through the docs or source of a library I didn't write. I am genuinely grateful to have taken 6.01, the course that replaced 6.001.
I am also grateful to have taken the condensed version of 6.001. You do need the ability to understand those abstractions in order to be an informed shopper though.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Hindley-Milner-Damas types and monads are now everywhere.
Haven't run into those. Perhaps I know them by a different name?
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#60Earlier 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…
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