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SICP taught in Python 3 - UC Berkeley online

www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu

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Re: SICP taught in Python 3 - UC Berkeley online

#21

Post by pavpanchekha »

73ChargerFan wrote: post #17
jgon wrote: post #11

Gah, stuff like this just tends to make me upset. SICP is probably still, bar none, the best text I have ever read. In any subject. Now, I'm biased towards computing and I'm sure that there are amazing texts in every field, but I would put this up against any book you can find. The book touches so many fields in computing and does it in a profound, deep, yet entertaining way. Part of its ability to do so is its use o…

Scheme wasn't shelved because it was a "fringe" language. In fact, Prof. Hilfinger the one who brought it to Berkeley in 1980, and that class 61A is the first course all CS majors take. Brian Harvey taught the class for ever, and published his own textbook "Simply Scheme." MIT is doing something similar, with the support of the authors. The same material is being taught, just in a different language.

MIT is not doing something similar; they are teaching different material in Python, following a different book. This is unpopular with the very best students, but even so only the ones who have ever heard of Scheme and SICP. But the introductory computer science course teaches state machines, a bit of recursion, and also a bit of circuits and the like. Nothing nearly as cool as writing your own compiler, however.

Re: SICP taught in Python 3 - UC Berkeley online

#22

Post by micaeked »

babarock wrote: post #10

A little off topic, but reading from week one include a Unix/Emacs tutorial. I wish they would stop defining "cat" as a command to "displays the content of specified files". This trend in the "Unix teaching" community is leading to a lot of terrible practice (Useless use of Cat) in the industry. I die a little every time I see $ cat file | grep word

can you please clarify:

- correct definition of 'cat'

- what is wrong with '$ cat file | grep word"

edit: formatting

Re: SICP taught in Python 3 - UC Berkeley online

#23

Post by kc5tja »

micaeked wrote: post #22
babarock wrote: post #10

A little off topic, but reading from week one include a Unix/Emacs tutorial. I wish they would stop defining "cat" as a command to "displays the content of specified files". This trend in the "Unix teaching" community is leading to a lot of terrible practice (Useless use of Cat) in the industry. I die a little every time I see $ cat file | grep word

can you please clarify: - correct definition of 'cat' - what is wrong with '$ cat file | grep word" edit: formatting

Correct definition of 'cat' -- a tool to concatenate one or more files sequentially into a single output stream. E.g., cat file1 file2 file3 >output-file

what is wrong with... -- "grep word file" takes fewer keys to type and uses fewer resources (important on a heavily loaded server with tons of processes which may well prove compromised and you're trying to peruse the logs for evidence. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and donated it to the local shelter).

Re: SICP taught in Python 3 - UC Berkeley online

#24

Post by notajith »

kc5tja wrote: post #23
micaeked wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you please clarify: - correct definition of 'cat' - what is wrong with '$ cat file | grep word" edit: formatting

Correct definition of 'cat' -- a tool to concatenate one or more files sequentially into a single output stream. E.g., cat file1 file2 file3 >output-file what is wrong with... -- "grep word file" takes fewer keys to type and uses fewer resources (important on a heavily loaded server with tons of processes which may well prove compromised and you're trying to peruse the logs for evidence. Been there, done that, got th…

People nag me about cat'ing stuff to grep, and I explain that it's just easier to edit the pattern when it is the last argument to the command. Also it of course fits better in the toolchain when I need to replace the input or the grep with something else.

Re: SICP taught in Python 3 - UC Berkeley online

#26

Post by Jach »

postfuturist wrote: post #4

I like Python, but how do they plan on teaching recursion with a language that doesn't optimize tail recursion? Oh, I see, just give them trivially small data sets: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/labs/lab8/lab8...

What's so hard about using a decorator? You still get the magic, it's just explicit.

Just one possibility: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/474088/

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