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Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
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Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#82Reading 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…
I might be canned for this here, but, I see that enterprises have a lot more work of the fundamentals, simpler sort than startups. At startups, I worked with 100s of libraries not understanding, or not having the time to even look back at things we did. At enterprises, there are a lot of low hanging fruit, which when applied magic CS pixie dust, becomes more performant (to a lot of people).
This is one of the reasons why I moved away from product side programming to IT. My brain screams in pain, when I do lot of context switches, and I figured this is not going to make me a better programmer. The fun stuff is in handling data, not learning layers of apis(for me).
Now working in enterprise is not for everyone - the politics etc, but for me, it still beats the pain of working in a smelly, loud, fast context-switching, agile-kanban startup.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Operating Systems at Bard College, a decidedly not top tier CS school but I still learned a fair bit :)
The materials, as far as I know, are not available online. But we used Tannenbaum's book which you can read for free here - http://stst.elia.pub.ro/news/SO/Modern%20Operating%20System%...
Enjoy!
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that it's because no one understands the fundamentals any more. (Which, BTW, the latter part I agree with.) I think it's because everything's gotten too large. You need to use too many frameworks and too many libraries just to get anything done today, and there's simply too much code there (assuming you're even allowed to look at the source!) to comprehend it. I don't like it, but I think it's an unavoid…
That's because at some point the industry lost the plot. The fundamentals are fundamental. They don't change very fast. Applications change all the time. So do frameworks. But there's very little genuinely new in most frameworks, or in most languages for that matter. They're mostly repackagings of the same few ideas. Which is why it's a lot easier to pick up applications and do a good job with them if you know the fu…
I wonder how much of this is due to the idea:
1) non-technical users need to be able to use our software. How much code today is about preventing users from doing something they should know better?
2) we're less and less able to say "no, that goes way beyond the project's scope" to our bosses. Our bosses will quickly reply "yeah well Google's ______ does it, so why can't we?".
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#85All 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.
Yes, he was insane.
More like a pedantic jerk.
It's good to know about the existence of quines. But people are (presumably) paying good money for (and more important: investing their perfectly valuable time in) their education, and there's only so much time in a systems programming class, and so much more fundamental stuff to cover (or cover more robustly).
The people who really need to figure out how to write quines will no doubt find time to do so, in the dead of night, no matter what you may try to do to stop them. (And try to make them 3 bytes shorter than the shortest known version in that particular language). The rest -- they just need to know that they're out there.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)
The application of mathematical type theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_F) to popular programming languages goes back to 1998 when Philip Wadler designed generics for Java.
Local type inference is now used in Visual Basic, Scala, Rust, probably a lot of other new languages I am missing. Gradual types are coming to Clojure and probably Python and Lua.
Erik Meijer did a lot of work on bringing monads and FRP as patterns to .NET programmers. Java 8 has monads (Optional and Stream interfaces). Bartosz Milewski has been getting a lot of attention in C++ circles (see his blog: https://bartoszmilewski.com/)
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand on the last sentence. I'm not sure I understand what you were trying to express. (not trolling, genuinely curious)
The application of mathematical type theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_F ) to popular programming languages goes back to 1998 when Philip Wadler designed generics for Java. Local type inference is now used in Visual Basic, Scala, Rust, probably a lot of other new languages I am missing. Gradual types are coming to Clojure and probably Python and Lua. Erik Meijer did a lot of work on bringing monads and FR…
Its application to unpopular languages goes back farther, of course.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#88I'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…
>Surely graduates of MIT, of all places, would be the ones building the libraries that ordinary programmers are stitching together and would still need the ability to build complex systems from fundamental CS abstractions?
"MIT" doesn't necessarily mean "super-elite programmer". I work in an office that's half MIT grads, and the non-MIT half are pretty much equivalently good (though with much worse connections around Cambridge). That's not to say MIT sucks or anything, but more to say that with luck, a really solid CS or EECS degree gets the student up to being able to build important components from scratch at all, which isn't necessarily the level needed to build those components from scratch for public release or for profit. That latter goal requires a good education followed by professional training and experience.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#89Reading 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…
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... I don't subscribe to the school of thought that values engineers lower on the stack more than those higher up, especially since there seem to be a lot more new jobs of the latter sort and we all need to make a living, and there are pl…
A worse problem would be simulating linux in your head as you methodically review the source.
Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP
#90I read about half of SICP and thought it was OK. Not great, but okay. The programmers I've met fall largely into two groups, those who like systems level programming, knowing how the OS works, how it interfaces with the hardware, what the memory layout is like, etc. and those who like abstraction and the things that SICP values. I'm definitely in the former group (but I certainly appreciate people who prefer the SICP…
>The programmers I've met fall largely into two groups, those who like systems level programming, knowing how the OS works, how it interfaces with the hardware, what the memory layout is like, etc. and those who like abstraction and the things that SICP values. I'm definitely in the former group (but I certainly appreciate people who prefer the SICP approach).
Many of us are in both groups, which is how stuff like Rust came about.