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SICP is Under Attack

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Re: SICP is Under Attack

#201

Post by schiptsov »

Why to make so much noise? Universities, even good ones, are about making money at first. So, if mediocre masses thinks that python is 'more practical' or that 'with Java they can always get a job' they have no choice, but to follow these stupid stereotypes.

Trying to convince mediocre masses that Scheme is really beautiful or SCIP is the greatest programming book ever (OK, together with the Man-month =) is not their job, their job is to get money from student's parents, good PR and grants from government or IBM.

Those who are smart enough and have a bit of taste will find out SCIP or discover beauty of Scheme (Python3/Ruby) and abandon Java or PHP themselves. ^_^

Re: SICP is Under Attack

#202

Post by hga »

gswang wrote: post #78

Whoa, stop. There's a lot of issues in this article. First of all, Berkeley is NOT getting rid of SICP and SICP ideas. This is flat out untrue. I'm a recent instructor for the course, and I've spoken to several TA's about this course. Below is a rough summary of what we've discussed. This should not be construed as the "official line", but take from it what you will. First, Berkeley are not getting rid of SICP. ‎For…

"First of all, Berkeley is NOT getting rid of SICP and SICP ideas."

Yeah, that's what they said at MIT, and to my somewhat limited knowledge it simply didn't happen (e.g. most of that material is supposed to be taught in a course that uses Java, which invokes the surface of the phrase "not even wrong").

Ah well, "and then there was one" (CMU among the top 4).

Re: SICP is Under Attack

#203

Post by hga »

gcv wrote: post #164
gswang wrote: post #78

Whoa, stop. There's a lot of issues in this article. First of all, Berkeley is NOT getting rid of SICP and SICP ideas. This is flat out untrue. I'm a recent instructor for the course, and I've spoken to several TA's about this course. Below is a rough summary of what we've discussed. This should not be construed as the "official line", but take from it what you will. First, Berkeley are not getting rid of SICP. ‎For…

I have taught short programming classes for total beginners, and had the most success by following the first chapter of SICP. 1. It explains what computation is. Total beginners generally have no idea how a program executes and what it does. Explaining it using the substitution model is extremely helpful. 2. It introduces functions right away. This is a way better introduction than trying to explain type-related nons…

There's no denying raw SICP demands a high level of mathematical maturity, since that could be assumed of all students taking 6.001 (all must master the calculus and calculus based Newtonian mechanics and E&M). But since you can't have an accredited by ABET CS program without requiring the calculus....

Re: SICP is Under Attack

#204

Post by hga »

civilian wrote: post #21

I think that starting with Python is a fine choice. Please keep in mind that it's just the introductory course-- these students are going to be battered with CS theory later on. We are graduating around 20% fewer students in CS than we were in 2004. We need to find a way to make CS more accessible. I'm not saying that we should make the whole degree easier, but I think that having an easier & more practical first cou…

It should be noted that both Stanford and MIT have seen a major recent increase in CS enrollment, MIT in the last academic year, Stanford a bit earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2442274. (CMU caps their annual enrollment at 135 students so isn't useful here ... but interestingly enough, contrary to the others in the top 4 they're moving even more towards instead of away from functional programming...).

Re: SICP is Under Attack

#205

Post by hga »

pavpanchekha wrote: post #200
scott_s wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT did not abandon SICP: it decided that it no longer wanted to teach core CS concepts. Wait, what? Are you claiming that the MIT undergraduate CS program does not "teach core CS concepts"? Or are you only talking about a single introductory course?

Haha, just 6.01, the world hasn't ended yet.

Yeah, but how well is the rest of SICP transmitted in a course using Java (6.005, at least according to the original plan)? Based on what I've seen (at a distance nowadays), MIT decided fundamentally change what it means to get an EECS education and degree in a panic move when enrollment dropped by half after being steady for decades.

Re: SICP is Under Attack

#206

Post by hga »

gigamonkey wrote: post #161

I don't know what, if anything, is going on at Berkeley, but Hal Abelson talked quite a bit about the switch from SICP to a different intro course at MIT when I interviewed him for Code Quarterly http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/ and it wasn't about abandoning Scheme or "not teaching core computer science". (Well, maybe a bit less core computer science in the intro course but that was basically so that C…

Yeah, well, Hal has be diplomatic, he can't authoritatively state that the order came down from on high (perhaps above the department) that Scheme was to be totally purged from the base undergraduate curriculum, which to my knowledge was finished not long ago. That's what's behind his statement "And for random reasons we didn't [do the course in Scheme]."

That said, Hal himself does fully support the change from SICP/6.001 to 6.01 according to my sources.

And you're right that much less EE is required of of pure CS majors (6-3s), but I'm told that very few current students do that major, most do the combined EECS one....

To finish, while I don't have time right now to finish reading/skimming your very interesting interview (you do realize you are by far the best interviewer in our field?) as far as I can tell a lot of the deep stuff taught in SICP/6.001 has also been purged from the base undergraduate curriculum. Kinda reminds me of when the Boy Scouts of the USA changed their system in the '70s so that you could become an Eagle Scout without ever having camped outdoors, started a fire, etc.

(My response to that was to drop out of Boy Scouts; here, as a scientist by inclination who just happens to narrow interests in CS which are fairly EQ with SICP I don't exactly have a dog in this hunt (amusingly, my other big interest in this general field is pure software engineering, the fruits of starting out on an IBM 1130 and realizing there HAD to be a better way to do things :-). Although I do seriously wonder about the de-emphasis of functional programming at some of the top 4 in the multi-core future which is today).

Re: SICP is Under Attack

#207

Post by prakashk »

cousin_it wrote: post #160
BDFL_Xenu wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And conveniently enough for this discussion, this happens to be exercise 1.19 of SICP ( http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-11.html... ).

Awesome! But actually I think my comment was inadvertently a bit more illuminating than the SICP exercise :-) Despite being on the web, SICP is a "traditional" textbook and doesn't bother to link to Wikipedia. Instead they use some sort of stone-age technology called "footnotes", stuffing all supplementary material right into the book as a couple lines of tiny text. So the student gets the feeling of following a twis…

> Instead they use some sort of stone-age technology called "footnotes", stuffing all supplementary material right into the book as a couple lines of tiny text.

A bit OT.

I got tired of clicking on the footnote links, and click to come back to text, and wrote a little Greasemonkey script that shows the footnotes on mouse hover. Makes reading the text a bit easier.

It's available at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/109690 in case anyone's interested.

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