Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

simondobson.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–189 of 189 posts

Re: SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

#181

Post by didibus »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #31

It’s interesting, SICP and other many other “classic” texts talk about designing programs, but these days I think the much more important skill is designing systems. I don’t know if distributed systems is consider part of “Computer Science” but it is a much more common problem that I see needs to be solved. I try to write systems in the simplest way possible and then use observability tools to figure out where the de…

My CS degree covered hardware architecture, disk design, OS design, and also system design, alongside algorithms, data-structures, various programming language and paradigm, etc.

Re: SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

#182

Post by 0xpgm »

upghost wrote: post #82

Hot take: SICP and SD4F "considered harmful (without counterpoint)"*. Why? The modus operandi of problem solving in these books is object oriented programming masquerading as functional programming, and it is presented as a _neutral_ beginner book. It is _not neutral_. This is a very opinionated approach to programming. To be fair, I do not believe the authors intended for this style of programming to be taken as gos…

> In other words, I say "SICP considered harmful" because thrusting it upon an eager newcomer as a trusted neutral guide to beginner coding (without offering any counterpoint) could set them back by a decade, filling their head with "functional object oriented programming" concepts that don't translate well to industry or CS.

I'd counter that by saying it would set them forward by a decade (compared to people who don't know these techniques). Knowing advanced techniques doesn't mean trying to shoehorn them into every run of the mill problem you encounter in the industry. But if you encounter a gnarly problem where some advanced techniques will help you out, you'll sure be glad you learnt them.

Re: SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

#184

Post by [deleted] »

WillAdams wrote: post #166
nyolfen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if we're talking about relative human-experienced performance, the slowest computers i ever owned were in the early-mid 00s. they sped up as multicore and ssd's entered the picture and plateaued about ten years ago ime.

The most striking performance observation of my experience was that Apple took a system, OpenStep 4.2 which ran okay on a 33 MHz 68040 (and acceptably on my 25MHz Cube) and made it run only a little bit better on a 400MHz G3 as the Mac OS X Public Beta. The difference of course was anti-aliasing, and much greater bit depth, and running multiple programming environments/toolkits (Carbon and Java).

[deleted]

Re: SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

#185

Post by [deleted] »

apwell23 wrote: post #136
porknubbins wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish someone told me this back when I was trying to get a programming job as a self taught programmer. I would do things like try to build a simple React clone thinking it would help me overcome imposter syndrome to fully understand things from the base up, but it was pretty futile because no one really has time to wrap their head around something that big unless they are paid full time to do it.

i did build a react clone in a long weekend. but I built the first 90% that takes 10% of the time and not the last 10% that takes 90% of time.

[deleted]

Re: SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

#186

Post by spdegabrielle »

sakras wrote: post #101
neilv wrote: post #3

The article has a broken link for the free copy: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b... https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf I hadn't seen a blessed PDF version until today. Circa 2001, only the HTML version was freely available, and someone converted it to TeXinfo: https://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/ If anyone wants to work through SICP today, you can run the code in MIT Scheme, or in…

Just as a data point, I'd recommend going through it in Racket, which I believe has an explicit SICP mode. I went through it in GNU Guile and it was a pain because there were some minor syntactic differences between Guile and MIT Scheme.

yes https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/index.html

Re: SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

#187

Post by spdegabrielle »

kkylin wrote: post #23
neilv wrote: post #3

The article has a broken link for the free copy: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b... https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf I hadn't seen a blessed PDF version until today. Circa 2001, only the HTML version was freely available, and someone converted it to TeXinfo: https://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/ If anyone wants to work through SICP today, you can run the code in MIT Scheme, or in…

For anyone wishing to try: the maintainers of MIT Scheme no longer provide a .dmg but you can download and build the x86_64 version of MIT Scheme. The current release (v12.1) works on a Mac running Sequoia with Intel CPU or on Apple silicon via Rosetta. But the native code compiler (not necessary for SICP AFAIK) is a little broken. (Anecdotally it worked on macOS prior to Monterey, so maybe an Apple-supplied dependen…

yes https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/index.html

Re: SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

#188

Post by spdegabrielle »

owl_vision wrote: post #16
neilv wrote: post #3

The article has a broken link for the free copy: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b... https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf I hadn't seen a blessed PDF version until today. Circa 2001, only the HTML version was freely available, and someone converted it to TeXinfo: https://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/ If anyone wants to work through SICP today, you can run the code in MIT Scheme, or in…

Dr Racket has SICP and HTDP as a teaching pack.

DrRacket (no space) and yes https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/index.html

Re: SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

#189

Post by spdegabrielle »

xdavidliu wrote: post #7
neilv wrote: post #3

The article has a broken link for the free copy: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b... https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf I hadn't seen a blessed PDF version until today. Circa 2001, only the HTML version was freely available, and someone converted it to TeXinfo: https://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/ If anyone wants to work through SICP today, you can run the code in MIT Scheme, or in…

one thing to note is that the second chapter's "picture language" is not supported in MIT Scheme in 2024. There used to be a package but it's like 2 decades out of maintenance. In Dr. Racket however, there is a package specifically for working through those problems.

yes https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/index.html it includes the picture language used in SICP.
Post reply on HN