Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP • Hacker News Board

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#111

Post by oumua_don17 » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:38 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #55

lisper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>> "no one has time to learn everything" - especially at the beginning of their career.

I wish I had this book at the beginning of my career. http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr.... Makes you design the hardware, then the software for that hardware.

Should not take more than 8 - 12 weeks with school work/day job.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#112

Post by deepaksurti » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:41 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #37

WalterSear wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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? What's going on over there? Ordinary programmers everywhere are building those libraries, just like your assumed wunderkind are building programs out other people's libraries. The nature of program…

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…

Formally, I think this to be a good list of fudamentals: programing paradigms, algorithms, data structures, compilers, operating systems, networking, math for CS.

What else would you recommend adding to the fundamentals list?

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#113

Post by reuven » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:46 PM UTC

Wow.

I took 6.001 as an undergrad at MIT. It changed my view of software forever.

Years later, I now spend most of my time training programmers at hi-tech companies in Python. The ideas that I got from 6.001 are pervasive in my training, and are fundamental (I think) for programmers to understand if they want to do their jobs well.

Given that I teach tons of Python, you might think that I'm happy that they switched to Python as the language of instruction. That's not the case; I think that Lisp offers more options for thinking about programming in different ways.

One of the great things about 6.001 was that it didn't try to teach you how to program for a job. It taught you how to think like a programmer, so that you could easily learn any language or technology they threw at you.

Oh, well.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#114

Post by fvt » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:48 PM UTC

Some day we will recognize that some areas of "programming" are very different and require different skill sets, and eventually different titles.

We tend to call everything "software engineering" so that everybody can feel proud of such a title ("I'm an engineer"), but engineering is certainly not about figuring out how to vertically center divs with CSS (and it's also not about proving algebra theorems either -- even if it can be essential when it comes to specific problems that require it).

I can't imagine Linux and PostgreSQL being built without "science", they use a lot of it, and I'm pretty sure the authors all have read SICP and those theoretical books. Poking at things proved to be efficient to building things quickly, but it's just not how one builds critical systems/software that are robust, efficient and maintainable.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#115

Post by ccalf » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:48 PM UTC

dimino wrote: post #75

fintuple wrote: post #21

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!

It doesn't, is the point that the folks who came up with SICP are trying to make.

Well the real issue is defining what's better. And the worry some of us have is this new trend of grappling with increased complexity seems short-sighted; we don't like the direction it's going. As much as Sussman shows understanding of the current situation, what he's saying is also a criticism--doing this sort of ad hoc "science by poking but not really science" is the heart of the issue.

And what's interesting is if you look at actual scientific research around programming, say dealing with concurrency and advanced tools like model checking, etc—all of that is very theoretical stuff that assumes you know SICP or have equivalent foundations. So it's not really an argument that theory is dying; in face of this new level of complexity in practice, perhaps we could benefit from theoretical research now more than ever.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#116

Post by eli_gottlieb » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:50 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #96

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Ru…

True, but the number of people who are good at both is very small :)

Really? Well, more money for us then.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#117

Post by lifeisstillgood » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:53 PM UTC

jdmoreira wrote: post #57

Reading 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…

>> moves so fast that I'm forced to use other peoples open source projects without even having the time to read the source

This.

Moving fast, sprinting, only looks like you are making progress. At some point the debt comes too much

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#118

Post by fsloth » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #79

mindcrime wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's exactly the point... these days, even 4 whole years isn't enough to learn "all the fundamentals", at least not while balancing things so that you learn enough practical skills to also do something useful. So what do we do, have people do a 4 year degree, and then go spend 8 weeks, or 16 weeks, or a year, learning to actually build systems? I don't know, maybe that is the answer. But I suspect the MIT guys…

> even 4 whole years isn't enough to learn "all the fundamentals" No. You are missing the point. The fundamentals are very simple and easy to learn. That's what makes them "fundamental." It's all the random shit invented by people who didn't understand the fundamentals (or chose not to apply them) that takes a long time to learn.

" It's all the random shit invented by people who didn't understand the fundamentals (or chose not to apply them) that takes a long time to learn."

Thanks, you succeeded in verbalizing succinctly the agony of so many software projects. However, I would claim it's just not ignorance of the fundamentals. It's simply more fun for a particular kind of mind to invent new abstractions and constructs than to solve actual problems. I call it cargo-cult progress.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#119

Post by bordercases » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

jdmoreira wrote: post #57

Reading 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…

Closed source? Decompile the fker.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#120

Post by jschwartzi » Wed, May 04, 2016, 9:58 PM UTC

fvt wrote: post #114

Some day we will recognize that some areas of "programming" are very different and require different skill sets, and eventually different titles. We tend to call everything "software engineering" so that everybody can feel proud of such a title ("I'm an engineer"), but engineering is certainly not about figuring out how to vertically center divs with CSS (and it's also not about proving algebra theorems either -- eve…

Software Engineering is more about methodically solving software problems than it is about which problems are being solved. A web developer who writes rigorous formal tests for a new page is engineering just as hard as an embedded developer writing rigorous acceptance tests for a board-support package. The engineering comes from the rigor and the fact that there is a controlled process for how software features get implemented.