Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP • Hacker News Board

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#61

Post by ktRolster » Wed, May 04, 2016, 6:43 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #55

lisper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one has time to learn everything Nonsense. The fundamentals don't take a long time to learn. And once you know them, everything else becomes much easier to learn. That's the reason that learning the fundamentals matters: it's a huge lever. Here's a single, small, very accessible book that takes you all the way from switches to CPUs: http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa... SICP gets you fr…

Yes, learning the fundamentals is a huge lever. I absolutely agree. But I still stand by the assertion that "no one has time to learn everything" - especially at the beginning of their career. As the old saying goes "if I had 3 days to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first 2.5 days sharpening my axe". Sure, but at some point you have to actually start chopping. By analogy, at some point you have to quit worrying about…

especially at the beginning of their career.

That's why you spend four years in a university before you start your career. If you're not going to learn all the fundamentals, you might as well go to an 8 week code camp and save your time.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#62

Post by varadg » Wed, May 04, 2016, 6:47 PM UTC

As a college student who followed along Berkeley's SICP lectures online in 2015 (taught by John DeNero), I am kinda confused by the Scheme v/s Python debate. Did I miss out on something having used Python in the entire first half of the course v/s say CS61A taught completely on Scheme (like when taught by Brian Harvey)?

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#63

Post by kreek » Wed, May 04, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

If you're learning Clojure there's a site/book that incorporates much of the original SICP text: http://www.sicpdistilled.com/

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#64

Post by mindcrime » Wed, May 04, 2016, 6:59 PM UTC

ktRolster wrote: post #61

mindcrime wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, learning the fundamentals is a huge lever. I absolutely agree. But I still stand by the assertion that "no one has time to learn everything" - especially at the beginning of their career. As the old saying goes "if I had 3 days to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first 2.5 days sharpening my axe". Sure, but at some point you have to actually start chopping. By analogy, at some point you have to quit worrying about…

especially at the beginning of their career. That's why you spend four years in a university before you start your career. If you're not going to learn all the fundamentals, you might as well go to an 8 week code camp and save your time.

But that's exactly the point... these days, even 4 whole years isn't enough to learn "all the fundamentals", at least not while balancing things so that you learn enough practical skills to also do something useful. So what do we do, have people do a 4 year degree, and then go spend 8 weeks, or 16 weeks, or a year, learning to actually build systems?

I don't know, maybe that is the answer. But I suspect the MIT guys have a point in terms of making some small concessions in favor of pragmatism. Of course, one acknowledges that college isn't mean to be trade school... Hmmm... maybe there is no perfect answer.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#65

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Wed, May 04, 2016, 7:00 PM UTC

Scramblejams wrote: post #38

lisper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the reason it has changed for everyone is that no one understands the fundamentals any more, because they aren't being taught to anyone. The ecosystem is thus becoming infested by horrible hacks which kinda-sorta work, and which everyone uses, because they kinda sorta work, and there is nothing else. The idea that programmers need to understand how to "program by poking" thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophe…

I'm not sure that it's because no one understands the fundamentals any more. (Which, BTW, the latter part I agree with.) I think it's because everything's gotten too large. You need to use too many frameworks and too many libraries just to get anything done today, and there's simply too much code there (assuming you're even allowed to look at the source!) to comprehend it. I don't like it, but I think it's an unavoid…

That's because at some point the industry lost the plot.

The fundamentals are fundamental. They don't change very fast.

Applications change all the time. So do frameworks. But there's very little genuinely new in most frameworks, or in most languages for that matter. They're mostly repackagings of the same few ideas.

Which is why it's a lot easier to pick up applications and do a good job with them if you know the fundamentals than if you're hacking away without any contextual or historical understanding.

Meanwhile someone is going to have to do the next generation of pure research, and it's a lot harder to do something creative and interesting in CS if all you've ever known is js, Python, and Ruby.

The reality is that software quality is decreasing. Never mind maintainability or even documentation - applications are becoming increasingly buggy and unreliable.

It's common in the UK now for bank systems to crash. Ten years ago it was incredibly rare, and twenty years ago it was practically unthinkable.

Software is too important to be left to improvisation and busking. So "just learn to make applications from other applications" is not a welcome move.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#66

Post by eric-hu » Wed, May 04, 2016, 7:01 PM UTC

jdmoreira wrote: post #57

Reading this made me so so sad, I do agree with the reasoning. I learned to program on a course that follows SICP, I spent all my college years learning how to program from first principles, building all the pieces from scratch. Building compilers, soft threads implementations, graph parsing algorithms... and I was happy with that way of programming! Today I'm an iOS developer, I spend most of my day 'poking' at the…

Please take advantage of your job mobility. Changing jobs in our line of work isn't as simple as flipping a switch, but you still are in so much demand. There's no need for you do engineering work you're dissatisfied with.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#67

Post by jeffreyrogers » Wed, May 04, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

I read about half of SICP and thought it was OK. Not great, but okay. The programmers I've met fall largely into two groups, those who like systems level programming, knowing how the OS works, how it interfaces with the hardware, what the memory layout is like, etc. and those who like abstraction and the things that SICP values. I'm definitely in the former group (but I certainly appreciate people who prefer the SICP approach).

There's room for both of course, but for people like me SICP was really a slog. Some of the exercises were hard sure, but more than that the material just wasn't that appealing to me. I don't have any comment on whether MIT's decision was the correct one, but liking SICP or working through SICP is by no means a prerequisite of being a good programmer.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#68

Post by jeffreyrogers » Wed, May 04, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

I read about half of SICP and thought it was OK. Not great, but okay. The programmers I've met fall largely into two groups, those who like systems level programming, knowing how the OS works, how it interfaces with the hardware, what the memory layout is like, etc. and those who like abstraction and the things that SICP values. I'm definitely in the former group (but I certainly appreciate people who prefer the SICP approach).

There's room for both of course, but for people like me SICP was really a slog. Some of the exercises were hard sure, but more than that the material just wasn't that appealing to me. I don't have any comment on whether MIT's decision was the correct one, but liking SICP or working through SICP is by no means a prerequisite of being a good programmer.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#69

Post by kajecounterhack » Wed, May 04, 2016, 7:06 PM UTC

jdmoreira wrote: post #57

Reading this made me so so sad, I do agree with the reasoning. I learned to program on a course that follows SICP, I spent all my college years learning how to program from first principles, building all the pieces from scratch. Building compilers, soft threads implementations, graph parsing algorithms... and I was happy with that way of programming! Today I'm an iOS developer, I spend most of my day 'poking' at the…

    I feel miserable doing the kind of programming I do 
    nowadays! I wish I could go back to simpler times, where 
    I actually had to reason about algorithms, data 
    structures, hardware, etc...

I don't subscribe to the school of thought that values engineers lower on the stack more than those higher up, especially since there seem to be a lot more new jobs of the latter sort and we all need to make a living, and there are plenty of cool problems in those spaces (algorithms, data structures, performance... it's all there).

But I think the lucky ones are people who get to work low enough relative to their knowledge where it doesn't feel they are dealing with endless abstractions and layer upon layer of magic.

    The startup I work for moves so fast that I'm forced to 
    use other peoples open source projects without even 
    having the time to read the source.

:( sounds to me that this might be more the problem. And worse is I suspect it's common.

Re: Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

#70

Post by jkaunisv1 » Wed, May 04, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #55

lisper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one has time to learn everything Nonsense. The fundamentals don't take a long time to learn. And once you know them, everything else becomes much easier to learn. That's the reason that learning the fundamentals matters: it's a huge lever. Here's a single, small, very accessible book that takes you all the way from switches to CPUs: http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa... SICP gets you fr…

Yes, learning the fundamentals is a huge lever. I absolutely agree. But I still stand by the assertion that "no one has time to learn everything" - especially at the beginning of their career. As the old saying goes "if I had 3 days to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first 2.5 days sharpening my axe". Sure, but at some point you have to actually start chopping. By analogy, at some point you have to quit worrying about…

This is what co-op programs address. 5 year degree, learn all the fundamentals from silicon to applications, with 6 co-op placements of 4 months each interspersed throughout. That was the Waterloo formula when I went through their CS program and it works tremendously well. Sure, it's a lot to learn in 5 years, and there's always more to learn, but it does give you a very solid foundation to build on.