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Brian Harvey: Why SICP matters

eecs.berkeley.edu

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Re: Brian Harvey: Why SICP matters

#31

Post by tikhonj »

koide wrote: post #29
dschiptsov wrote: post #4

I just finished watching MIT 6.00SC for the hell of it. It was really sad experience. Of course, prof. Guttag is really a big-shot and seems like no one could say anything, but I cannot even properly describe how much worse it was than CS61A by Brian Harvey. It is not just Python, it is ugly Python, boring Python, without any hint of elegance it could be. No list-set-dict comprehensions, which is what makes Python in…

On a tangent, it's not only list-set-dict comps what makes Python interesting. The very simple and powerful approach to metaprogramming is very interesting as well (all the magic __whatever__ methods, for example)

Scheme is also known for its simple and powerful meta-programming system: macros.

Macros might be hard to fully understand at first, but the core idea is really simple. They're also extremely powerful: they let you change the actual syntax of a program and give you extremely fine-grained control over virtually everything.

Re: Brian Harvey: Why SICP matters

#32

Post by ramkalari »

The best cs book by a mile. One can't help but fall in love with programming after reading SICP. I'm now reading Peter Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming. It's another classic. I've also listened to video lectures of Brian Harvey. I think his own twists to SICP such as starting the course with functions on words instead of numbers are invaluable too.

Re: Brian Harvey: Why SICP matters

#33

Post by wangg »

"In my experience, relatively few students appreciate how much they're learning in my course while they're in it."

How true! I hated CS61A when I was in it, and I thought nothing was practical and everything was a trivial example. Sorry Brian! I failed to grasp the depth of all the 'trivial' examples. I never appreciated the complexities of the class until I started being a TA for it, and I never truly loved the class until I lectured it.

Notes, homeworks, etc, available here: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/su10/

Re: Brian Harvey: Why SICP matters

#34

Post by sanxiyn »

Is this still true?

"The language in which you'll spend most of your working life hasn't been invented yet, so we can't teach it to you. Instead we have to give you the skills you need to learn new languages as they appear."

Re: Brian Harvey: Why SICP matters

#35

Post by neverm0re »

rustc wrote: post #2

As someone who hasn't been able to get enough motivation to read past the first few pages of SICP, I _really_ wish someone made a TryRuby.org like thing using SICP. Please!

I've found using SICP in TexInfo format over at http://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/ to be quite useful when you throw it into Emacs with a Racket acting as a REPL and a scratch buffer, like so: http://i.imgur.com/J3lI1.png

Re: Brian Harvey: Why SICP matters

#37

Post by Derbasti »

rustc wrote: post #2

As someone who hasn't been able to get enough motivation to read past the first few pages of SICP, I _really_ wish someone made a TryRuby.org like thing using SICP. Please!

I always found the book too dry. Then I discovered the video lectures and they blew my mind. I suggest you give them a try.

Re: Brian Harvey: Why SICP matters

#40

Post by minikomi »

rustc wrote: post #2

As someone who hasn't been able to get enough motivation to read past the first few pages of SICP, I _really_ wish someone made a TryRuby.org like thing using SICP. Please!

Have you tried Racket? http://racket-lang.org/

& check instructions here: http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-sicp/

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