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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

#201

Post by blt »

Joof wrote: post #146
WildUtah wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reasoni…

Today I learned why I hated calculus. Real analysis sounds like fun!

This is a really good way to learn it, best class I ever took: http://www.jiblm.org/downloads/dlitem.php?id=66&category=jib...

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#202

Post by wiz21 »

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…

I was trained on Scheme 20 years ago. Scheme was the moment when I felt I "got" programming right (before that I did lots of Pascal, basic, assembler,etc).

Now I do Python. And with Python I "got" something too : writing tools, coding, etc. is not like mathematics (like Scheme) anymore. It became a social activity. I'm in the field of ERP right now (arguably not the most theory-oriented stuff). It's because I spend most of time using API's by other and making API's in the hope that they will be used by other (none of those API being worth much in terms of computer "science" (stuff like algorithm). I'm also building tools to augment productivity of other people; which is also quite social.

So from the abstract Scheme programming, I've moved to Python social programming. That keeps me happy (I must confess that studying Voronoi diagrams, or 3D structures packing remain what made me really tick :-) )

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#203

Post by sklogic »

heurist wrote: post #130
sklogic wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why exactly you're wasting your skills on something as pitiful as this? There is a lot of work out there for people who can build complex solutions from the first principles.

Even piecing together systems out of existing components significantly benefits from knowledge of first principles.

Maybe. But he obviously feels miserable doing this. What's the point of being miserable while there is a lot of much more fun things to do?

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#204

Post by loup-vaillant »

rimantas wrote: post #197
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't subscribe to the school of thought that values engineers lower on the stack more than those higher up Meaning developers who understand low-level details vs. developers who just wire up high level libraries? I've done the full range, from entire games written in assembly language and embedded C code, through high level full stack development with NodeJS, Python, and other languages. The low-level coding is fa…

Sorry, that way you do not write an app for all of the platforms. You write for none of them it just happens to run on one of them.

Err, what do you mean? I once wrote the embryo of a game with Qt, it ran on 3 environments (GNU/Linux, Windows, Android). What to I care that I write for "none" of those platforms if it "happens" to run on all 3?

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#205

Post by loup-vaillant »

jim-greer wrote: post #161
lisper wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What should we consider fundamental? A fair question, and a full answer would be too long for a comment (though it would fit in a blog post, which I'll go ahead and write now since this seems to be an issue). But I'll take a whack at the TL;DR version here. AI, ML, and NLP and web design are application areas, not fundamentals. (You didn't list computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, embedded systems -- all a…

I'm of two minds about this. Everything you mention is great background to have. (Though non-trivial programs can't be reasoned about mathematically much more than biological systems can). I think this deep background is a great goal. But in another way programming is a craft. You can learn as you go. There are millions of bright people who could do useful, quality work without an MIT-level CS education. They just ne…

> (Though non-trivial programs can't be reasoned about mathematically much more than biological systems can).

I wouldn't be so sure. I once applied for a company that was about proving various safety properties of control and signalling applications (for trains). Sizeable applications. They have problems with the halting problem and combinatorial explosions, but they get around those and do it anyway.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#206

Post by loup-vaillant »

conceit wrote: post #148
lisper wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What should we consider fundamental? A fair question, and a full answer would be too long for a comment (though it would fit in a blog post, which I'll go ahead and write now since this seems to be an issue). But I'll take a whack at the TL;DR version here. AI, ML, and NLP and web design are application areas, not fundamentals. (You didn't list computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, embedded systems -- all a…

> AI, ML, and NLP and webdesign are application areas On first thought, I do agree. However, they are fundamental applications. Category Theory is categorizing the fundamentals. It uses a lot of the fundamentals on itself, I guess, but that doesn't mean ti me it's inaccessible or useless.

Don't confuse "important" with "fundamental". He probably meant foundational to begin with.

The web for instance is an unholy mess. We can do better for mass electronic publishing. We don't because that huge pile of crap is already there, and it's so damn useful.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#207

Post by loup-vaillant »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #166
ccalf wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SICP is programming for the theoretically inclined. It seems analogous to calculus in math versus calculus for physics: you can study it more formally with all the proper proofs and derivations (and bizarre cases), or pick up just the applied bits (such as chain rule and dot notation) that you need for doing AP physics. This analogy suggests the existence of two approaches, with different implications and consequence…

I think that is true to some extent, but Knuth's approach (which I'm more drawn to) is also theoretically inclined, albeit of a different approach than SICP. Knuth (and myself) see programming as fundamentally being about computers, and Knuth starts with what a computer can do and builds from there. Ableson and Sussman see programming as more about computation, so they start with a model of computation (based on sche…

Are program meant to tell the computer what to do? (Knuth)

Or are computers meant to execute our programs? (CISP)

Personally I lean towards the second view, for a simple reason: we design programs much more often than we design computers. Computer design doesn't take much of humanity's time, compared to programming them. So I'd rather have the hardware (and compiler suite) bend over backwards to execute our pretty programs efficiently, than having our programs bend over backwards to exploit our hardware efficiently.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#208

Post by Derpdiherp »

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…

Have you considered getting into embedded development? You tend to be dealing with much lower level code and closer to the hardware. It's fun :)

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#209

Post by tetha »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #180
kajecounterhack wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't subscribe to the school of thought that values engineers lower on the stack more than those higher up Meaning developers who understand low-level details vs. developers who just wire up high level libraries? I've done the full range, from entire games written in assembly language and embedded C code, through high level full stack development with NodeJS, Python, and other languages. The low-level coding is fa…

> While that may not seem intrinsically harder, none of these are typically something you can Google or search StackOverflow for the answers on.

From my multi-threaded background - The problem is, the code looks simple and the code actually doesn't get more complicated. Usually, the code you need to write in 90% of the time actually becomes easier to write for most people, because they can work in rigidly defined boundaries.

However, explaining why this part of the code base is safely threaded and scales vertically across multiple cores, and how we avoided multiple non-obvious bottle-necks, and the optimization the software 3 services in the past matters... that's going to take hours. And at that point, we haven't touched lock-free operations yet.

And after that, understanding how to design an architecture from scratch, how to interact with the network and the kernel properly, how to enable distribution of the application in an elastic manner... yeah. Let's get a room.

And these kind of systems are exactly the systems which benefit from the SICP-approach. Thread pools, message queues, databases, the network, lock-free data structures all are well-understood components we can combine in structured manners.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#210

Post by jdmoreira »

Derpdiherp wrote: post #208
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…

Have you considered getting into embedded development? You tend to be dealing with much lower level code and closer to the hardware. It's fun :)

Thanks for this comment. Actually I have considered embedded a lot. I love C, specially free standing C.

I will probably move to embedded soon. Problem is I have lot of experience with iOS but not that much experience with embedded, I'm willing to get a pay cut just to get out of iOS but there's a limit of how low I can go.

There's also a lot more iOS jobs than embedded jobs!

edit: Other than C, I'm very curious about rust and nim-lang. I do not know C++ though. Hope that won't be a problem.

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