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Programming and Programming Languages

papl.cs.brown.edu

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Re: Programming and Programming Languages

#4
post #2

At first glance this book appears in many ways to be a spiritual successor to SICP... does this hold up for anyone who has read it more throughly?

More like a spiritual successor to HtDP, which is somewhat opposed to the SICP philosophy, even though both use Scheme variants:

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h...

Re: Programming and Programming Languages

#5
post #4
post #2

At first glance this book appears in many ways to be a spiritual successor to SICP... does this hold up for anyone who has read it more throughly?

More like a spiritual successor to HtDP, which is somewhat opposed to the SICP philosophy, even though both use Scheme variants: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h...

How is HtDP opposed to the SICP philosophy? From my reading both come off as espousing the more or less same ideas for building programs.

Re: Programming and Programming Languages

#6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like a spiritual successor to HtDP, which is somewhat opposed to the SICP philosophy, even though both use Scheme variants: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h...

How is HtDP opposed to the SICP philosophy? From my reading both come off as espousing the more or less same ideas for building programs.

read the linked paper :)

Re: Programming and Programming Languages

#8
His other book was PLAI which was pretty cool: http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/

I worked through it for a class, and I distinctly remember a moment where I thought "what the fuck - did I just write a working type inferencer?". It has a great way of simplifying things to the point where adding a complex new language feature isn't a distant theoretical proposition, it seems like a simple and straightforward next step. Of course, it helped that I had a great instructor.

I can't speak for this new book, but it seems like an interesting combo of intro to programming and programming languages. And it's in pyret, which is like the bastard child of python and plt-scheme: http://www.pyret.org/

Re: Programming and Programming Languages

#9
post #4
post #2

At first glance this book appears in many ways to be a spiritual successor to SICP... does this hold up for anyone who has read it more throughly?

More like a spiritual successor to HtDP, which is somewhat opposed to the SICP philosophy, even though both use Scheme variants: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h...

Interesting...

It seems to me that FP is having quite a renaissance recently, which could limit the relevance of that paper's contentions today. I'm also seeing quite a backlash against OOP and especially OOP as the One True Paradigm that it was pushed as in throughout the 00s - this can be seen not only in FP language growth but also in the design of other new languages like Go that lack many OOP features.

Honestly, I would argue for the "Never Compromise" route for undergraduate regardless of current trends. I've found firsthand that mid-to-high-achieving high school students are able to grep SICP just fine, even if they haven't been introduced to calculus as of yet. But I haven't read HtDP or PPL yet, so I can't really pass judgement on which book would be better.

Re: Programming and Programming Languages

#10
post #4
post #2

At first glance this book appears in many ways to be a spiritual successor to SICP... does this hold up for anyone who has read it more throughly?

More like a spiritual successor to HtDP, which is somewhat opposed to the SICP philosophy, even though both use Scheme variants: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h...

I am curious what evidence there is that SICP is responsible for "[many introductory] courses quickly disappeared again due to shortcomings of the book and the whimsies of Scheme."
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