5 ms·

SICP Distilled: An idiosyncratic tour of SICP in Clojure

243 points by jboynyc 11y ago

k_bx 11y ago
I think this is awesome! One thing – would be really awesome if examples would be editable and you could evaluate them via ClojureScript somehow, that would make a huge advantage I think.
fu86 11y ago
This was a Kickstarter a year ago (i baked too): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1751759988/sicp-distilled https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1751759988/sicp-distill... Unfortunately the author still not be able to fullfill the goals :/ So, bookmark this and visit it in a year or two again.
- macmac 11y ago
  I am with you, and also a backer. The original goal was exceeded by a wide margin (£12,927 pledged of £3,500 goal). 12K GBP is a non-trivial amount of money. There are no videos (if you exclude a low quality recording of a talk on the project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVM8N0eH9Qk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVM8N0eH9Qk), no screencasts and the text only covers a few of the topics outlined in the campaign.
  - thattommyhall2 11y ago
    Either of you please email me with your backer number and I can refund you or turn what you paid into a donation to Médecins Sans Frontières if you are not happy. I am very pleased with what is there so far, think it genuinely captures all the best bits in an accessible way. I am most proud of the Escher and Evaluator bits and associated projects. I have lots more partially complete, feel I have a fair bit of momentum now and do still intend to make videos as I said in the update to backers, backers will see them first. I am genuinely sorry it has taken so long to get this out. I think I was quite fair minded re: pricing etc during the kickstarter. I changed it from a sliding scale to allowing unlimited people taking the lowest amount (£20), then created a 'pay what you can' tier and invited people to switch to it if they wished. Best wishes, Tom
    - DigitalJack 11y ago
      I think you are off to a great start, and appreciate the effort.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      It seems like a communication problem. If you're still going forward but don't push sub-par content out in the public due to pressure, this is acceptable; but if people don't know (I can't read the KS status updates, but there's not many of them) they'll be angry just because of that.
keyan 11y ago
"To use an analogy, if SICP were about automobiles, it would be for the person who wants to know how cars work, how they are built, and how one might design fuel-efficient, safe, reliable vehicles for the 21st century." On that note can anyone recommend SICP-equivalents for automotive, locomotive and aerospace engineering?
- robto 11y ago
  I can't speak to locomotive or aerospace, but I found The Reluctant Motor Mechanic by John Fordham a great introduction to how cars work. It was written in 1979 and you can pick up a used copy from Amazon for approximately $0.01+shipping. It's a thorough introduction to how the whole car works, written to be understood by actual humans who don't have experience with engineering. He goes through each system, starting with the engine, until he has covered every piece of equipment inside your car. It doesn't take as long as you'd think, either - he's pretty concise. It was written in 1979, so it only covers technology up to that point, but since the car is basically the textbook case of what you can achieve through incremental improvements, it's still pretty relevant. Plus, it's got a lot of good illustrations!
- simonb 11y ago
  I always thought of it as being a kindred spirit to Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
throwaway76411 11y ago
I feel very uneasy about this project. SICP is a classic text, and although it is old, it has not aged. I wonder if this is a sign of a stagnation in the field of computing, that as the machines we use become exponentially more powerful, we still know very little about how to use them. In any case, SICP is still an excellent introduction to computing and does not need to be updated just yet. The name "SICP Distilled" feels very misleading. The programming language has been changed, in what I assume was an attempt to be more trendy, and the content has been changed to the point that it only superficially resembles the original text. There is no better language to explain the concepts of SICP than Scheme, and it appears the author understands this, as he had to remove sections of the text to compensate for Clojure's unsuitability. It appears that he changed or removed a large portion of the text, in fact, and added in their place new ideas which are arguably unrelated to the spirit of the original book. Perhaps it is merely the name "SICP Distilled" that makes me apprehensive, and I would be happy if it was marketed as something completely unrelated, with only a nod to SICP as its inspiration. However, it feels wrong as it is. Peter Norvig wrote that SICP "is a very personal message that works only if the reader is at heart a computer scientist"[1] It is entirely possible that this project will bring some of the most important ideas of SICP to those who do not fit that description. But is that a goal we should be striving to achieve? This question makes me think back to a portion of the quote, on the very first page of SICP, by Alan Perlis: "Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands."[2] [1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R403HR4VL71K8/ http://www.amazon.com/review/R403HR4VL71K8/ [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-3.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-3.html
- calibraxis 11y ago
  The math should probably be way understated, for a general non-MIT/CS audience: "Abelson: There’s a tremendous amount [of math] in this 6.001 book. That’s partly because we were writing it for MIT. You want to talk about higher-order procedures, so the obvious thing you can do is you can express the idea of an integral. So that’s an obstacle for lots of places. Remember, at MIT the context we were writing in is every person who took the course had just had a semester of calculus." "We actually did some versions for the Humanities faculty, where we didn’t do that at all, and we effectively started with the data structure chapter and then talked about the ideas for how do you structure and manipulate data, and then do abstractions over that." http://codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/ http://codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/
kephra 11y ago
What is the sense in teaching SICP in a language that has no tail optimization? McEval would run straight into the wall.
- joonoro 11y ago
  You can use recur for tail call optimization in Clojure, though it's messier than Scheme. > Note that recur is the only non-stack-consuming looping construct in Clojure. http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28recur%20exprs*%29 http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28recur%2...
  - hga 11y ago
    I personally think there's something to be said for making tail recursion explicit, as Clojure on the JVM requires, although the greater mess is not good, especially for introducing the concepts, and Clojure on the JVM can't do all types of desirable tail recursion.
lgrapenthin 11y ago
Excercise 1.5 needs fix, def form is is invalid
- thattommyhall2 11y ago
  Thanks! (you might need to shift-refresh to see it yourself as I set cache headers your browser should also honour)

243 points by jboynyc 11y ago

k_bx 11y ago

I think this is awesome! One thing – would be really awesome if examples would be editable and you could evaluate them via ClojureScript somehow, that would make a huge advantage I think.

fu86 11y ago

This was a Kickstarter a year ago (i baked too): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1751759988/sicp-distilled https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1751759988/sicp-distill... Unfortunately the author still not be able to fullfill the goals :/ So, bookmark this and visit it in a year or two again.

macmac 11y ago
I am with you, and also a backer. The original goal was exceeded by a wide margin (£12,927 pledged of £3,500 goal). 12K GBP is a non-trivial amount of money. There are no videos (if you exclude a low quality recording of a talk on the project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVM8N0eH9Qk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVM8N0eH9Qk), no screencasts and the text only covers a few of the topics outlined in the campaign.
- thattommyhall2 11y ago
  Either of you please email me with your backer number and I can refund you or turn what you paid into a donation to Médecins Sans Frontières if you are not happy. I am very pleased with what is there so far, think it genuinely captures all the best bits in an accessible way. I am most proud of the Escher and Evaluator bits and associated projects. I have lots more partially complete, feel I have a fair bit of momentum now and do still intend to make videos as I said in the update to backers, backers will see them first. I am genuinely sorry it has taken so long to get this out. I think I was quite fair minded re: pricing etc during the kickstarter. I changed it from a sliding scale to allowing unlimited people taking the lowest amount (£20), then created a 'pay what you can' tier and invited people to switch to it if they wished. Best wishes, Tom
  - DigitalJack 11y ago
    I think you are off to a great start, and appreciate the effort.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    It seems like a communication problem. If you're still going forward but don't push sub-par content out in the public due to pressure, this is acceptable; but if people don't know (I can't read the KS status updates, but there's not many of them) they'll be angry just because of that.

keyan 11y ago

"To use an analogy, if SICP were about automobiles, it would be for the person who wants to know how cars work, how they are built, and how one might design fuel-efficient, safe, reliable vehicles for the 21st century." On that note can anyone recommend SICP-equivalents for automotive, locomotive and aerospace engineering?

robto 11y ago
I can't speak to locomotive or aerospace, but I found The Reluctant Motor Mechanic by John Fordham a great introduction to how cars work. It was written in 1979 and you can pick up a used copy from Amazon for approximately $0.01+shipping. It's a thorough introduction to how the whole car works, written to be understood by actual humans who don't have experience with engineering. He goes through each system, starting with the engine, until he has covered every piece of equipment inside your car. It doesn't take as long as you'd think, either - he's pretty concise. It was written in 1979, so it only covers technology up to that point, but since the car is basically the textbook case of what you can achieve through incremental improvements, it's still pretty relevant. Plus, it's got a lot of good illustrations!
simonb 11y ago
I always thought of it as being a kindred spirit to Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

throwaway76411 11y ago

I feel very uneasy about this project. SICP is a classic text, and although it is old, it has not aged. I wonder if this is a sign of a stagnation in the field of computing, that as the machines we use become exponentially more powerful, we still know very little about how to use them. In any case, SICP is still an excellent introduction to computing and does not need to be updated just yet. The name "SICP Distilled" feels very misleading. The programming language has been changed, in what I assume was an attempt to be more trendy, and the content has been changed to the point that it only superficially resembles the original text. There is no better language to explain the concepts of SICP than Scheme, and it appears the author understands this, as he had to remove sections of the text to compensate for Clojure's unsuitability. It appears that he changed or removed a large portion of the text, in fact, and added in their place new ideas which are arguably unrelated to the spirit of the original book. Perhaps it is merely the name "SICP Distilled" that makes me apprehensive, and I would be happy if it was marketed as something completely unrelated, with only a nod to SICP as its inspiration. However, it feels wrong as it is. Peter Norvig wrote that SICP "is a very personal message that works only if the reader is at heart a computer scientist"[1] It is entirely possible that this project will bring some of the most important ideas of SICP to those who do not fit that description. But is that a goal we should be striving to achieve? This question makes me think back to a portion of the quote, on the very first page of SICP, by Alan Perlis: "Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands."[2] [1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R403HR4VL71K8/ http://www.amazon.com/review/R403HR4VL71K8/ [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-3.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-3.html

calibraxis 11y ago
The math should probably be way understated, for a general non-MIT/CS audience: "Abelson: There’s a tremendous amount [of math] in this 6.001 book. That’s partly because we were writing it for MIT. You want to talk about higher-order procedures, so the obvious thing you can do is you can express the idea of an integral. So that’s an obstacle for lots of places. Remember, at MIT the context we were writing in is every person who took the course had just had a semester of calculus." "We actually did some versions for the Humanities faculty, where we didn’t do that at all, and we effectively started with the data structure chapter and then talked about the ideas for how do you structure and manipulate data, and then do abstractions over that." http://codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/ http://codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/

kephra 11y ago

What is the sense in teaching SICP in a language that has no tail optimization? McEval would run straight into the wall.

joonoro 11y ago
You can use recur for tail call optimization in Clojure, though it's messier than Scheme. > Note that recur is the only non-stack-consuming looping construct in Clojure. http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28recur%20exprs*%29 http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28recur%2...
- hga 11y ago
  I personally think there's something to be said for making tail recursion explicit, as Clojure on the JVM requires, although the greater mess is not good, especially for introducing the concepts, and Clojure on the JVM can't do all types of desirable tail recursion.

lgrapenthin 11y ago

Excercise 1.5 needs fix, def form is is invalid

thattommyhall2 11y ago
Thanks! (you might need to shift-refresh to see it yourself as I set cache headers your browser should also honour)