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Why SICP Matters

cs.berkeley.edu

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Re: Why SICP Matters

#51

Post by obviouslygreen »

steveklabnik wrote: post #33
SeanDav wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Berkeley are making a huge mistake and losing sight of what a University is there for. They seem to have moved to a more practical approach than theoretical approach. This is the type of approach that is more appropriate to a Technical College than a major University. This new approach almost seems like teaching civil engineers how to weld and rivet in order to build bridges, rather than deeply understand…

s/Berkeley/most universities in the States/

Honest interest from someone who doesn't know: While I know this is happening at least some other places in the US (it happened to the one I went to and to at least one a friend attended), is it largely limited to this country, or are other countries seeing similar issues?

Re: Why SICP Matters

#52

Post by zenbowman »

I started an SICP study group at work, where a few of us get together and watch the MIT video lectures given by Abelson and Sussman. People were a little skeptical at first, given that they consider themselves top-of-the-line l33t hackers and this is an introductory course, but after the 3rd lecture, nobody questioned the value of it.

It's a timeless course.

Re: Why SICP Matters

#53

Post by zenbowman »

eru wrote: post #47
gcv wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic typing is outdated?!

Yes, since at least 80s or so. Languages based on Hindley-Milner type system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner ) are static and nice to work with. E.g. OCaml or Haskell. I have some professional experience in rewriting Python and Ruby programmes in Haskell. I make the same amount of stupid mistakes in Python as in Haskell. But whereas Python blows up at runtime / test time, in Haskell it's the co…

I agree. A type system is good if it allows you to express everything you want to express, if not (as in Java), it is a tool for oppression.

Re: Why SICP Matters

#54

Post by [deleted] »

eru wrote: post #47
gcv wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic typing is outdated?!

Yes, since at least 80s or so. Languages based on Hindley-Milner type system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner ) are static and nice to work with. E.g. OCaml or Haskell. I have some professional experience in rewriting Python and Ruby programmes in Haskell. I make the same amount of stupid mistakes in Python as in Haskell. But whereas Python blows up at runtime / test time, in Haskell it's the co…

[deleted]

Re: Why SICP Matters

#55

Post by zenbowman »

ramkalari wrote: post #34

I was working through the coursera functional programming course on scala which is modeled on SICP. While the content is really good, it suffers from the same problems pointed out by Dr Harvey. Getting used to scala syntax takes time while Scheme was a breeze.

Yeah, Scala is the new C++ - immensely powerful but there's ten different ways to do everything.

I like the language, but I'm simultaneously disgusted by it.

Re: Why SICP Matters

#56

Post by Fixnum »

gnosis wrote: post #50
eru wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, since at least 80s or so. Languages based on Hindley-Milner type system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner ) are static and nice to work with. E.g. OCaml or Haskell. I have some professional experience in rewriting Python and Ruby programmes in Haskell. I make the same amount of stupid mistakes in Python as in Haskell. But whereas Python blows up at runtime / test time, in Haskell it's the co…

I have experience with OCaml, and I don't find its static typing to be nice to work with at all. I like the final result of safety, and how whole classes of bugs are excluded once I get my OCaml program to compile. But the process of getting my program to compile in the first place is pretty painful and not fun. Then again, writing endless unit tests in a dynamically typed language like Scheme is not much fun either.…

The soon-to-be-released GHC 7.8 (Haskell) can defer type errors until runtime to allow you run your program even if part of it is broken, and you can also add "holes" in place of an arbitrary expression and the compiler will tell you the type of the expression you need to replace it with (of course, this will explode if run). I suspect GHC's error messages are better than Ocaml's as well.

Re: Why SICP Matters

#57

Post by pimeys »

obviouslygreen wrote: post #51
steveklabnik wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/Berkeley/most universities in the States/

Honest interest from someone who doesn't know: While I know this is happening at least some other places in the US (it happened to the one I went to and to at least one a friend attended), is it largely limited to this country, or are other countries seeing similar issues?

My university (Helsinki University of Technology) changed the freshman course from SICP to Java in the beginning of the century. The reason was Nokia, who wanted Java programmers straight from the school.

Nowadays they're using Python.

I'm very disappointed I didn't have a chance to study that course. I read the book last year and did some exercises by my own. I never had so much fun with any CS book than I had with SICP.

Re: Why SICP Matters

#58

Post by jallmann »

calibraxis wrote: post #48

For those turned off by its mathiness, one of the coauthors explained, "There’s a tremendous amount [of math] in this 6.001 book. That’s partly because we were writing it for MIT. You want to talk about higher-order procedures, so the obvious thing you can do is you can express the idea of an integral. So that’s an obstacle for lots of places. Remember, at MIT the context we were writing in is every person who took t…

That is really a wonderful interview. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Why SICP Matters

#59

Post by spitfire »

eru wrote: post #46

I am revisiting SICP at the moment, because a friend uses it to learn programming. But I have to say, I am not nearly as impressed with the book as I used to be. Wadler's critique "Why calculating is better than scheming" ( http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.p... ) fully applies, and the book can be rather confused and ad-hoc in some places, e.g. section 1.3. A stronger focus on data structure…

If you're critiquing the book in such a lucid manner, it sounds like you got good value from it.

Re: Why SICP Matters

#60

Post by gnosis »

Fixnum wrote: post #56
gnosis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have experience with OCaml, and I don't find its static typing to be nice to work with at all. I like the final result of safety, and how whole classes of bugs are excluded once I get my OCaml program to compile. But the process of getting my program to compile in the first place is pretty painful and not fun. Then again, writing endless unit tests in a dynamically typed language like Scheme is not much fun either.…

The soon-to-be-released GHC 7.8 (Haskell) can defer type errors until runtime to allow you run your program even if part of it is broken, and you can also add "holes" in place of an arbitrary expression and the compiler will tell you the type of the expression you need to replace it with (of course, this will explode if run). I suspect GHC's error messages are better than Ocaml's as well.

That's good to know, and gives me extra incentive to learn Haskell some day.

On the Scheme side of things, I've heard that the newish (4.8.0 and up) versions of Chicken can perform flow analysis to catch some type errors at compile time, and optimize based on types.

There's also Typed Racket, and Chicken has a contracts egg that allows procedures to have pre- and post- conditions.

For some years now, I've heard predictions that in the future languages will allow their users to "dial up" or "dial down" safety features on demand. I guess the above features of Scheme and Haskell are some early steps along that path. We live in interesting times.

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