61–70 of 77 posts
My girlfriend has told me a couple times she wants to learn to program but this is the only intro book I own. I feel bad giving it to her because it just beats you with recursion right from the beginning (that isn’t to say it’s bad, I love it, that’s why I own a copy. I just feel like you’ll appreciate it most if you already know a little of some non functional language.) On the other hand she took it with us on a pi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recursion seems to be one of those inflection points that some people just can't get past.
What I personally see in academic setting is that when recursion is taught, it's taught using examples where you would not want to use recursion. It's easy to understand why recursion is useful when you are tasked with traversing a file system. It's not when the first example you are given is calculating Fibonacci sequence.
The very first exercise should be as simple as possible. Explicitly because you're introducing a new concept and so want as little else in the way as you can arrange.
My girlfriend has told me a couple times she wants to learn to program but this is the only intro book I own. I feel bad giving it to her because it just beats you with recursion right from the beginning (that isn’t to say it’s bad, I love it, that’s why I own a copy. I just feel like you’ll appreciate it most if you already know a little of some non functional language.) On the other hand she took it with us on a pi…
This can be interpreted two ways:
1. It really is an introductory text and, as the book says, recursion is a simple, powerful, familiar idea.
2. Times have changed.
I’m partial to interpretation #1
My girlfriend has told me a couple times she wants to learn to program but this is the only intro book I own. I feel bad giving it to her because it just beats you with recursion right from the beginning (that isn’t to say it’s bad, I love it, that’s why I own a copy. I just feel like you’ll appreciate it most if you already know a little of some non functional language.) On the other hand she took it with us on a pi…
html5 version: http://sarabander.github.io/sicp/ more resources: https://bitbucket.org/Tetsumi/workspace/snippets/ke6jL4/sicp
I make a point of re-reading Alan Perlis' preface from time to time: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/... Fun is important, and it seems all too easy to lose sight of that.
Maxwell v. Kelvin: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/fourier-analysis/ode-to...
My girlfriend has told me a couple times she wants to learn to program but this is the only intro book I own. I feel bad giving it to her because it just beats you with recursion right from the beginning (that isn’t to say it’s bad, I love it, that’s why I own a copy. I just feel like you’ll appreciate it most if you already know a little of some non functional language.) On the other hand she took it with us on a pi…
I'm not disagreeing with you as I write this, more pontificating on teaching styles... we all know recursion can get tricky / be hard to understand in the context of a programming language, but sometimes it's all in the presentation... if we tell the student right up front "hey, this is how we do this, no big deal right?" then perhaps they don't put up their natural defenses and make it into a harder concept than it really is?
My girlfriend has told me a couple times she wants to learn to program but this is the only intro book I own. I feel bad giving it to her because it just beats you with recursion right from the beginning (that isn’t to say it’s bad, I love it, that’s why I own a copy. I just feel like you’ll appreciate it most if you already know a little of some non functional language.) On the other hand she took it with us on a pi…
My girlfriend has told me a couple times she wants to learn to program but this is the only intro book I own. I feel bad giving it to her because it just beats you with recursion right from the beginning (that isn’t to say it’s bad, I love it, that’s why I own a copy. I just feel like you’ll appreciate it most if you already know a little of some non functional language.) On the other hand she took it with us on a pi…
If you only ever buy/read two computer science books, get your hands on Abelson/Sussman's SICP and Knuth's TAOCP. I could program before studying at uni, but thanks to our two-term course Algortmics I+II at FAU Erlangen (part I based on SICP), it seems a fog that I wasn't even aware of cleared.