i watched the lecture series during the pandemic and commented on many of the youtube videos. in at least one instance, a library function is used on the board that is not compatible with the current function signature in mit scheme.
Which function?
Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures
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Re: Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures
#22In the first lecture, Abelson says Computer Science is neither a science nor is it really about computers. Considering the current ML paradigm, maybe CS has finally earned its name as a science.
It is one of the most memorable first lectures in the history of Computer Science.
Re: Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures
#23In the first lecture, Abelson says Computer Science is neither a science nor is it really about computers. Considering the current ML paradigm, maybe CS has finally earned its name as a science.
What about the current ML paradigm makes it a science?
We have “laws” and routinely conduct “experiments” which are kind of unheard of in CS.
Re: Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures
#24i watched the lecture series during the pandemic and commented on many of the youtube videos. in at least one instance, a library function is used on the board that is not compatible with the current function signature in mit scheme.
Oh no. I suppose it is something to do with the fact that it has been, what, almost 40 years since the lectures? The fact that most of the code would still work is a miracle. That wouldn't work for, say, Java (which didn't exist in 1986). Nor C++. Nor Javascript (also not there back then). Fortran and C might be able to pull it off (but barely). Remember, we didn't have computers worth the name back then. Shoot, we d…
> That wouldn't work for, say, Java
The ~29 years deprecated java.util.Date* methods would like to have a word. ;-)
*https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/25/docs/api/java.base...
Re: Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures
#25There's also this interesting study about the difficulty and time requirement of SICP's exercises: https://lockywolf.wordpress.com/2021/02/08/solving-sicp/ The math stuff is brutal.
Take that writeup with a massive grain of salt. The author claims they spent 459 minutes on exercise 1.1, that exercise is this:
> Exercise 1.1: Below is a sequence of expressions. What is the result printed by the interpreter in response to each expression? Assume that the sequence is to be evaluated in the order in which it is presented.
There are then 12 simple expressions to evaluate. That is, it took them nearly 40 minutes for each expression.
Exercise 2.46 took them 535 minutes to implement. It wasn't even complex math, they needed to create a 2d-vector data type (their choice on implementation details) with a constructor, accessors, addition, subtraction, and scaling. That should not have taken 9 hours to complete (not by that point in the book at least).
Re: Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures
#26Re: Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures
#27i watched the lecture series during the pandemic and commented on many of the youtube videos. in at least one instance, a library function is used on the board that is not compatible with the current function signature in mit scheme.
Use the racket #sicp language: https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/SICP_Language.html