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

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

#31

Post by __turbobrew__ »

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 design is deficient and then maybe I will pull out a data structure or some other “computer sciency” thing to solve that problem. It turns out that big O notation and runtime complexity doesn’t matter the majority of the time and you can solve most problems with arrays and fast CPUs. And even when you have runtime problems you should profile the program to find the hot spots.

What computer science doesn’t teach you is how memory caching works in CPUs. Your fancy graph algorithm may have good runtime complexity but it completely hoses the CPU cache and you may have been able to go faster with an array with good cache usage.

The much more common problems I have is how to deal with fault tolerance, correctness in distributed locks and queues, and system scalability.

Maybe I am just biased because I have a computer/electrical engineering background.

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

#32

Post by llm_trw »

__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…

You're in luck. Part 5 of the book is about building a virtual machine to run lisp simalated at the register lelvel: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

Writing a network between n such machines is left as an exercise to the reader.

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

#33

Post by KerrAvon »

__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…

If you knew how to design programs you could run it all on a single box and wouldn’t have to design “systems.”

I’m being slightly facetious, but only slightly. If you really think everything is solvable with arrays, you are not going to scale well and of course you’re going to need to throw a lot more hardware at the problem.

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

#34

Post by hluska »

alabhyajindal wrote: post #12

I really wanted to like SICP but Lisp throws me off. I love Haskell and Standard ML however! Did others have a similar experience? Might be interesting to read a book similar in spirit to SICP but using a different language as a vehicle (No, I don't want to do SICP in JavaScript).

I can identify with that - Lisp throws me off (because I’m not smart enough). But I ended up forcing myself to work through it and learned a tremendous amount because I’m not smart enough to work with a lisp. It felt like I spent so much time just reading through the code that I ended up learning more than I would in a language I’m comfortable with.

There is a Python version of SICP. I have never worked through it or even given it more than a cursory scan so this is not an endorsement more just a link to prove it exists:

https://wizardforcel.gitbooks.io/sicp-in-python/content/0.ht...

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

#35

Post by PittleyDunkin »

chongli wrote: post #13
abeppu wrote: post #10

> In fact, I’d go further and say that it’s the only computer science book of that age that I’d happily and usefully read again without it being just for historical interest: the content has barely aged at all. That’s not all that unusual for mathematics books, but it’s almost unheard of in computer science, where the ideas move so quickly and where much of what’s written about is ephemeral rather than foundational.…

I recall that when MIT stopped teaching with SICP, one of the main claims was that programming now is often not about thinking abstractions through from first principles, and creating some isolated gem of composing definitions. Which is a category mistake that they actually address in the lectures. SICP is not a programming course, it’s a computer science course. Computer science is not about computers, let alone pro…

> SICP is not a programming course, it’s a computer science course.

I don't see what you mean by this at all. Furthermore this doesn't strike me as a useful distinction when a) it doesn't cover most topics labeled by consensus as "computer science" and b) it very clearly does teach a great deal about programming.

Why not say it teaches computer science and programming skills? Why do these have to be exclusive? There's obviously a great deal of overlap in general.

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

#36

Post by linguae »

alabhyajindal wrote: post #12

I really wanted to like SICP but Lisp throws me off. I love Haskell and Standard ML however! Did others have a similar experience? Might be interesting to read a book similar in spirit to SICP but using a different language as a vehicle (No, I don't want to do SICP in JavaScript).

You might be interested in a 1987 article titled "A Critique of Abelson and Sussman or Why Calculating is Better than Scheming" (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/24697.24706), where the author advocates the use of KRC or Miranda as alternatives to Scheme. I don't know much about KRC, but Miranda is a statically-typed functional programming language that influenced Haskell.

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

#38

Post by tkiolp4 »

__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…

I find books like SICP interesting and not very useful. I love reading them because I like this stuff, but I don’t get to apply their teachings in real world software. It’s a problem because naturally I want to spend my time reading these kind of books, but if I do that I would be jobless. I need to divide my time between reading pearls like SICP and boring Kafka/Postgres/Golang/K8s/AWS documentation.

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

#39

Post by MikeTaylor »

Just dropping in to say that The Elements of Programming Style is worth reading three times — and I have read it many more times than that, and benefitted from it. Here's my review (from 2010) if you're interested: https://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/programming-books-pa...

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

#40

Post by soegaard »

__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…

Have you seen

"Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner" by Chris Hanson and Gerald Jay Sussman

It's from 2021.

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