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

Post by dbtc » Sat, Nov 16, 2024, 9:24 PM UTC

jgon wrote: post #22

whobre wrote: post #17

I don’t quite get the cult status of SICP. I read it and it’s a fine beginner programming book, but nothing more.

Just so we're clear, this is a "beginner programming book" that has you create a scheme interpreter, then a register machine simulator, then a compiler out of your interpreter that will then have its compiled code run on the register machine simulator, by the final chapter. This is probably the part where you'd step up and post a link to your repo with solutions to the exercises to back up your talk, but generally I…

Post by pipes » Sat, Nov 16, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

soegaard wrote: post #40

__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.

Post by cess11 » Sat, Nov 16, 2024, 9:33 PM UTC

rustybolt wrote: post #18

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 really wanted to like SICP and I probably would have if I read it 15 years ago. I started reading it last month and I found it to be too broad. It covers too much interesting mathematical principles and then jumps to the next one right when it starts to get interesting. In other words, it's too shallow. It probably doesn't help that I've seen many courses/documents that are (in hindsight) derivatives from SICP, so…

Post by tanEel » Sat, Nov 16, 2024, 9:42 PM UTC

__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…

Post by lovecg » Sat, Nov 16, 2024, 10:07 PM UTC

tkiolp4 wrote: post #38

__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.