What's your excuse for not reading SICP? Just the first three chapters and you won't regret it

What's your excuse for not reading SICP? Just the first three chapters and you won't regret it

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I'm a professional programmer with 15+ years of experience, why would I waste my time on an outdated introduction to programming course written by a couple of professors without any experience outside their ivory tower, constructed around a dead language and which has been shilled as a revelation for 30 years now without anyone actually using the ideas from it in practice.

Came here to post exactly that.

It has a bizarre order of presenting topics -- an ordering that's totally out of touch with what's going on in actual computer science classrooms.

For example, it starts right out in chapter 1 by jumping into recursion and recursive tree algorithms. A vast majority of computer science faculty know that you can't just walk into a lower-level programming class and on the first week show the students how Ackermann's function works, and how to recursively calculate the nth Fibonacci number in log n time using a clever tree-walking approach. For this reason, the book is pretty much totally ignored by a vast majority of computer science departments.

What ever happened to teachers trying to figure out how to best communicate technical material to students in a clear, straightforward manner that's carefully designed to make the material as easy for the students to learn as is feasible?

There is no fucking reason why any textbook needs to EVER be perceived as hard or challenging. If the author truly cares about explaining the material clearly, and has the communication skills to do so, any subject can be explained in a way that most of the students find easy and straightforward to learn. Unfortunately, not nearly enough authors care to develop that skill, anf SICP is one of the most atrocious examples of that.

There are reasons why SICP has been rejected by a vast majority of universities for their computer science program. It's good to learn those reasons -- because that helps you understand how to write better textbooks.

paulgraham.com/avg.html

>brainlets complaining about it being too hard

"professional" programmers, everyone

>this 16 years old article by a venture capitalist who hasn't used Lisp since 1996 says if you don't like Lisp you're basically just dumb
How can a dead programming language produce such a smuggery? Also, I've read this and other articles by Graham, I've read his book, fuck, I've even read 3 or 4 chapter of SICP until I got bored since it wasn't telling me anything new but insisted I use a lot of predicates for something I knew pretty well it better to do with an actual type system.
>I have no reading comprehension
I never said it's hard, I said it's 1) outdated 2) have no connection to reality 3) the alleged superiority of its approach has never been demonstrated because no one has written anything significant using it. I mean, you can say C is shit, but your OS is written in C. You can cay C++ is shit but your browser is written in C++. You can say OOP is shit, but most of the complex systems in production nowadays are written using OOP. You can say (the actual) FP is shit, but more and more languages are borrowing ideas from Haskell nowadays. Yet for some reason, nothing significant has been written using SICP's approach.

>"professional" programmers, everyone

Except that in the computer science classroom, the students aren't professional programmers (yet). It does no good to complain about the quality of the students. As an educator, you have to deal with the students you have. And SICP just doesn't fit. So it's no surprise that it's only a meme textbook, and has been rejected by a vast majority of universities.

>"""programs"""
get on my level brainlets

have any of you read How to Design Programs? is it worth it or should I go straight to programming principles and practice using C++

PPP2 is the introductory text you should be reading before SICP or How to Design Programs. Those are intermediate texts.

> From paulgraham.com/avg.html:
> "It's hard to imagine writing programs without using recursion"

If I ever interviewed an engineer who said that during an interview, I would immediately escort him out the door, and chastise him for wasting my time.

Plus I love how he considers his usage of Lisp to be some kind of secret competitive advantage. Nothing quite beats the combination of being both arrogant and an idiot at the same time.

So your complaint is basically that it doesn't teach you how to make games and websites? Recursion and trees are some of the most basic computer science concepts. I haven't read it but it seems perfectly suitable for an introduction.

ok. and do you think its worth to read HtDP and SICP afterwards?

i tried but had no motivation to follow it, maybe i should try again idk, but even mit haa dropped it

this is why you're not Paul Graham, you're a code monkey :)

Kozen is my favourite
His TOC book is the bedt book to ever be written

>t. C# expert, street shitting enthusiast

lmao his "conversion" website doesnt even work

I am reading it.

Some of the concepts are really difficult, so progress is really slow. But I actually feel like I'm growing as a developer, which is really satisfying.

At this rate it will take me a year to get through it though.

>constructed around a dead language and which has been shilled as a revelation for 30 years now without anyone actually using the ideas from it in practice.

1. the fact that the ideas from the book and other MIT symbolic programming research aren't being used is why almost all software sucks, many "new ideas" in computing are ones implemented by those folks a long time ago

2. good software does use the idea in that book, Department of Defense military planning systems are a bunch of lisp machines communicating, Sussman's students went on to found companies that made stuff like the entirety of the first commercially used 3D graphics animations, the first consumer EDA and CAD automation tools, and the first high speed trading expert systems. Every modern feature of language design, IDE's and devops automation like inspection, runtime stepping, editor macros, reflection, higher order functions, AST navigation, containers, virtualization, just-in-time-compiling, interactive documentation, and machine learning all crawled out of the MIT AI culture.

/thread

Paul Graham is pretty much a code monkey.
>invents his own toy language for which he even can't provide a proper implementation
>tries to sell it by huge Dunning–Kruger effect level shitposts
>one-trick-ponies some chaos companies, basically committing fraud in the process
>rises up to "Management"

classic pajeet

>1.
[citation/evidence required]
>2.
[citat... fuck it, it's obvious that's bullshit. They didn't invent the stuff in the book.

I'm lying actually, you're right, none of the MIT AI research and students from that era are worth looking into, I've failed to bamboozle you

>t, 15+ year experience Java "Architect"

we should make this a real vn where you can romance abelson or sussman or both

It's still more than 1) practical experience the authors of SICP had 2) practical experience SICP shills have.

shoveling horse manure for 15 years is practical experience too

>I am more experienced than the authors of SICP

actually look into these people before talking out your ass you rube code monkey simpleton

groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/
groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/biography.html

didn't think people could be so autistic until I read this thread

Do you not know anything about the history of MIT and computers? It would be hard to overstate their importance.

I'm too dumb for it.