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Beautiful Online SICP

sarabander.github.io

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Re: Beautiful Online SICP

#33

Post by banachtarski »

gumby wrote: post #28
banachtarski wrote: post #27

Unpopular opinion but having read this book, I think it's a "good" text that is a bit blown out of proportion in terms of how good it is. I'm curious for people that endorse to such a magnanimous degree what other literature they've read and what aspects of SICP in particular they find so superior.

First of all, it's an introductory text that provides a practical whirlwind tour of introductory computer science. Second starts from a straightforward place (when the first edition was written it was quite reasonable to assume that a student arriving at university, even MIT, might never have programmed a computer before) and after one lecture on the scheme language, dives in to practical details. Third, unlike, say,…

Right I always wondered if my opinion of it stemmed from the fact that I read it relatively late in my career. Never having fresh eyes on it, I suppose it's easy to take things like syntax and such for granted. That said, is Scheme really a good language for "not getting hung up on syntax?" It has an admittedly simple grammar but I can't help but feel that with the prevalence of ALGOL style languages, an intro student is better off just just biting the bullet and learning something more traditional.

If I was going to teach things like type systems and such and was ok with exotic syntax, I might teach Haskell or something.

Re: Beautiful Online SICP

#34

Post by yoz-y »

banachtarski wrote: post #33
gumby wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, it's an introductory text that provides a practical whirlwind tour of introductory computer science. Second starts from a straightforward place (when the first edition was written it was quite reasonable to assume that a student arriving at university, even MIT, might never have programmed a computer before) and after one lecture on the scheme language, dives in to practical details. Third, unlike, say,…

Right I always wondered if my opinion of it stemmed from the fact that I read it relatively late in my career. Never having fresh eyes on it, I suppose it's easy to take things like syntax and such for granted. That said, is Scheme really a good language for "not getting hung up on syntax?" It has an admittedly simple grammar but I can't help but feel that with the prevalence of ALGOL style languages, an intro studen…

At my university the introductory programming was taught using scheme and I found it weird at first as I knew the more traditional approaches (personally I have taught myself programming first in Basic and Pascal).

Later I have been assisting a professor during python classes and I have come to appreciate the benefits of a purely functional language for introductions (our teachers have strategically chosen not to talk about the `begin` keyword in Scheme). Many students have had really hard time grasping the idea of variables and scopes.

Re: Beautiful Online SICP

#35

Post by agumonkey »

ldjb wrote: post #17

SICP is the one text I wish I'd known about when studying computer science at uni. When I finally discovered and read it, it was a truly eye-opening experience and revolutionised the way I thought about tackling problems and designing software. It may have been around for a while, but the ideas presented still hold water today. As others have mentioned, the linked version has some definite improvements over the web v…

I have no idea why I started a lisp quest in my final uni year, but I felt the same when I found SICP.

ps: beside the very bad quality images, I'm still in love with the old layout.

Re: Beautiful Online SICP

#36

Post by Latty »

yoz-y wrote: post #34
banachtarski wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right I always wondered if my opinion of it stemmed from the fact that I read it relatively late in my career. Never having fresh eyes on it, I suppose it's easy to take things like syntax and such for granted. That said, is Scheme really a good language for "not getting hung up on syntax?" It has an admittedly simple grammar but I can't help but feel that with the prevalence of ALGOL style languages, an intro studen…

At my university the introductory programming was taught using scheme and I found it weird at first as I knew the more traditional approaches (personally I have taught myself programming first in Basic and Pascal). Later I have been assisting a professor during python classes and I have come to appreciate the benefits of a purely functional language for introductions (our teachers have strategically chosen not to tal…

Because so many of us learn imperative programming first, then find functional a big shift, I think we forget that everyone learns maths, which has no mutable state in the traditional maths classroom written style, and so functional actually resonates pretty well with people who have never touched programming at all, provided they've been exposed to enough maths.
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