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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

#221

Post by mindcrime »

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.

No. You are missing the point. The fundamentals are very simple and easy to learn. That's what makes them "fundamental."

I think what we actually disagree about is just the exact definition of "fundamentals". I personally would not say "the fundamentals are very simple and easy to learn". At least not if you're learning them to the level of depth that I would want to learn them.

Now if we're just saying that people only need a very high level overview of "the fundamentals", then that might swing the equation back the other way. But that, to me, is exactly the knob that the MIT guys were twiddling... moving away from SICP and using Python doesn't mean they aren't still teaching fundamentals, it just sounds like they aren't going quite as deep.

Anyway, it's an analog continuum, not a binary / discrete thing. We (the collective we) will probably always be arguing about exactly where on that scale to be.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#222

Post by thaumasiotes »

hga wrote: post #214
thaumasiotes wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, MIT's intro calculus classes are overwhelmingly for people who have studied calculus before. Making it an actual requirement wouldn't change much.

Errr, when did this happen? As of 1979, the 18.01 I took matched what I understand is the the AP Calculus BC sequence, and while having previous exposure to the calculus certainly helped, it wasn't assumed.

How many freshmen come to MIT having never studied calculus?

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#223

Post by lisper »

mindcrime wrote: post #221
lisper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No. You are missing the point. The fundamentals are very simple and easy to learn. That's what makes them "fundamental." I think what we actually disagree about is just the exact definition of "fundamentals". I personally would not say "the fundamentals are very simple and easy to learn". At least not if you're learning them to the level of depth that I would want to learn them. Now if we're just saying that people o…

> I think what we actually disagree about is just the exact definition of "fundamentals".

That may well be, but as I am the one who first used the word into this conversation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11630205), my definition (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11632368) is the one that applies here.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#224

Post by JadeNB »

fsloth wrote: post #118
lisper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

> It's simply more fun for a particular kind of mind to invent new abstractions and constructs than to solve actual problems.

Spolsky calls these 'architecture astronauts' (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html). (As a mathematician, I have a certain leaning to this mindset, so I clarify that I am not criticising it, just reporting on existing terminology.)

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#225

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

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.

I test on iPad, iPod Touch, a half dozen Android devices, and on emulators. Works well everywhere, even with platform-specific differences in design to match different platform paradigms. And I have happy clients.

I've run into this attitude before, though. It seems to be the last bastion of denial of folks who have spent a lot of time learning one platform and who don't want to learn something new. Sorry, but there are better ways.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#226

Post by bps4484 »

hga wrote: post #108
bps4484 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may have been that it just took 7 years to actually get a new course in place, but it wasn't until fall 2007 that MIT officially got rid of 6.001 as required course, well after the dot com crash. There were a TON of changes that happened with the MIT EECS curriculum at that time, so perhaps it was a holistic response to the dot com crash that was beyond just 6.001.

I think "panicked spasm" is more accurate than "holistic response", at least in connotation, but as I recall the only real changes were in what was required, terminating the use of Scheme in the entire required curriculum with extreme prejudice, and adding, what, 6.005? Where they claimed to teach most of what was in 6.001/SICP, but using Java, a language which is "not even wrong" for that purpose. Yeah, MIT has beco…

No, there were many changes to the curriculum, and for a variety for reasons.

They created 6.01, which serves at an "intro to EECS" so it involves both EE and CS, as opposed to the old intro 6.001 which was really an introduction to CS. Some argue that this course is easier (I never took it, so I can't say) which could definitely be argued is to make EECS a little more gentle and open in response to the dot com crash.

They also broke up 2 very difficult courses, 6.046 introduction to algorithms and 6.170 lab for computer science, and at least put some of their course work into new courses. Again this could be seen as making the entire major a little gentler.

They also changed requirements. In the past there had been a lot of CS focused students who were uninterested in doing any EE, and were choosing to major in 18.c (math with computer science) to avoid an EE course load. The department right thought it was a little crazy that people were leaving the CS department in order to focus more on CS, so they lightened the required EE coursed for 6.3 (a major focused on CS) and vice versa.

This is all my recollection from the 07-09 era and from talking to some students since. There could be some errors in details.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#227

Post by rwallace »

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…

> The low-level coding is far more skilled work than the high level coding. Instead of most of the work being "how do these plug in to each other?", it's how exactly does my code function with respect to all of the potential events additional threads, and how all of the edge cases interact, and what is causing this obscure bug?

I've done the full range too, and I don't agree that low-level involves more skill. I think it involves different skills. When you're working high-level, you don't have the above questions so much, to be sure. Instead you have questions like, what are the relevant business rules? Which ones are stable and which ones are going to change? Does this user interface suck? Is the program giving answers that actually correspond to reality? Does anyone want this product in the first place? Different questions, but not easier to answer.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#228

Post by [deleted] »

bps4484 wrote: post #226
hga wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "panicked spasm" is more accurate than "holistic response", at least in connotation, but as I recall the only real changes were in what was required, terminating the use of Scheme in the entire required curriculum with extreme prejudice, and adding, what, 6.005? Where they claimed to teach most of what was in 6.001/SICP, but using Java, a language which is "not even wrong" for that purpose. Yeah, MIT has beco…

No, there were many changes to the curriculum, and for a variety for reasons. They created 6.01, which serves at an "intro to EECS" so it involves both EE and CS, as opposed to the old intro 6.001 which was really an introduction to CS. Some argue that this course is easier (I never took it, so I can't say) which could definitely be argued is to make EECS a little more gentle and open in response to the dot com crash…

[deleted]

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#229

Post by rwallace »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #117
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

In a startup context, the trick is to make sure the technical debt comes due after the point at which you find out whether you've got a product people actually want in the first place.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#230

Post by kazinator »

wiz21 wrote: post #220
kazinator wrote: post #187

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. Join the TXR project: http://www.nongnu.org/txr http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/ I made some 3000 commits all by myself since 2009. The main reason why this exists is the above: a project where I can stuff ideas, algorithms, what…

TL;DR but it reminds me of Awk...

Awk also has an input scanning sublanguage which implicitly marches through data, and that language can evaluate expressions and functions in another sublanguage. That's where the analogies end.
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