81–90 of 130 posts
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Which would you recommend to read first?
Personally, SICP. I found that the format of LS got old fast.
Maybe the humor was just lost on me...
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If you're critiquing the book in such a lucid manner, it sounds like you got good value from it.
I don't deny that. I liked it quite a lot when I read it in my teens, and learned a lot. But revisiting the book in detail has brushed off some of the nostalgia. It is a product of its times.
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…
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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…
Does MIT even use Scheme for their intro CS courses anymore? Harvey's article makes it sound like they switched to Python when they went from a "curriculum organized around topics" to a "curriculum organized around applications" - it seems to be the trend everywhere.
Excellent article. I'm immensely glad and lucky to have had Brian Harvey as a professor, and this echoes exactly what he taught us and the general teaching at Berkeley: that the concepts of programming and computer science were of paramount importance, and that you should understand them in the abstract. To this day, this is why I value a good theoretical CS education, why I value university education, and why I cont…
http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/courses/description/CMSC/10500/99...
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If you're critiquing the book in such a lucid manner, it sounds like you got good value from it.
I don't deny that. I liked it quite a lot when I read it in my teens, and learned a lot. But revisiting the book in detail has brushed off some of the nostalgia. It is a product of its times.
Is there another book that is like SICP in overall thematic content that uses Miranda? (Or I guess Haskell might be a more likely choice today?)
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I don't deny that. I liked it quite a lot when I read it in my teens, and learned a lot. But revisiting the book in detail has brushed off some of the nostalgia. It is a product of its times.
Fair enough, but try picking up any other computer science book from that era and I bet there isn't a single one that has aged as well.
C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie
The Practice of Programming Kernighan and Pike
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I don't deny that. I liked it quite a lot when I read it in my teens, and learned a lot. But revisiting the book in detail has brushed off some of the nostalgia. It is a product of its times.
Fair enough, but try picking up any other computer science book from that era and I bet there isn't a single one that has aged as well.
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Forth-Leo-Brodie/dp/097645870...
I have to confess I just discovered you can order a relatively cheap copy (well, compared to Amazon) of SICP direct from MIT. I have only skimmed so far, but combined with the lectures I have to say that I really wish that had been my introduction to programming. Maybe it is just because of where I'm at, but it really feels like in the first 3 lectures some of the more elusive topics of programming are at least touch…
http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Prog...