19 ms·

Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

478 points by brunoc 10y ago

stepvhen 10y ago
All that said, it is still worthwhile to work through all of SICP, if you want a deeper understanding of how certain tools work. Writing your own interpreter is a very rewarding experience.
- fsloth 10y ago
  I think going through SICP and most of all, writing my own interpreter, made me an all around better programmer. I noticed my systems thinking clarified considerably. Not in an aloof way but by providing actual actionable insights on how to implement and structure things.
- yolesaber 10y ago
  Having to write my own shell in C for my operating systems class absolutely blew my mind. And then after that my professor made us implement a quine in the shell we just wrote. Yes, he was insane.
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    Genuinely curious: what are some of the interesting things in writing your own shell? Was it the programming language interpretation aspect, or having to learn the kernel's API for forking tasks and redirecting, etc.?
    - flying_kangaroo 10y ago
      Not OP but also had to write my own shell, as well as the kernel APIs for forking and whatnot. The kernel APIs are definitely interesting, but I think the biggest dopamine rush was once the way to parse and structure commands "clicked" and suddenly shells made a whole lot of sense.
      - yolesaber 10y ago
        also being able to look at the source code for a kernel and saying "ah ha! so that's where the process table is created" is also a lot of fun...kind of like uncovering ancient artifacts and learning to read the glyphs
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      Well it was my first low level experience so a lot of it was new to me - I hadn't even used C before so pointers alone were a revelation of sorts. I was blown away by the idea of interpretation and then once we delved into forking and processes (and zombie processes), well I truly went down the rabbit hole. It was really cool implementing your own system hooks with Minix - being able to press F12 to get a formatted tables of all running system calls was supremely satisfying. I fully appreciated how complicated and yet in a way beautiful OSes could be and it forced me to learn how to sweat the small stuff and build good software from the ground up.
  - dnautics 10y ago
    this is going to sound crazy, but in eighth grade I took a CS class where they had us create an interpreter in lisp. It was amazing, and I haven't done anything quite like it since (though dan boneh's crypto class on coursera was close).
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      That sounds fun! Lisp is great for that because of its code-as-data principle (I use clojure in my day job and it makes dealing with structured data like JSON an absolute breeze). Did you go to an advanced school or something?
      - dnautics 10y ago
        well, i started coding in 1st grade (logo, then basic) but this was a summer program hosted by Johns Hopkins. It was highly theoretical - we learned about DFAs, NFAs, epsilon-NFAs, and turing machines.
        yolesaber 10y ago
        Awesome! I started in the 5th grade with Perl (lol) and went to a bunch of summer programs but they were more hands-on and programming based. Very cool. I learned about state machines when I was 16 and would draw my own really complicated ones for fun haha.
        s_p_lee 10y ago
        Wow, I had completely forgotten about writing that interpreter for the PURPLE language [1] in that class. Thanks for the memories! [1] http://www.mattababy.org/~belmonte/Teaching/CS1/PURPLE_project.html http://www.mattababy.org/~belmonte/Teaching/CS1/PURPLE_proje...
        dnautics 10y ago
        Were you in that class with me? drop a line. Would love to hear from someone else in that class!
  - chubot 10y ago
    Which class/university was it? Any chance the materials are online? I'm actually writing my own shell now; I'd be interested to compare :) The fork/exec/pipe/dup calls are definitely an unusual and powerful paradigm. I think too many programmers don't know this because we were brainwashed to make "portable" programs, and that's the least portable part of Unix.
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      Operating Systems at Bard College, a decidedly not top tier CS school but I still learned a fair bit :) The materials, as far as I know, are not available online. But we used Tannenbaum's book which you can read for free here - http://stst.elia.pub.ro/news/SO/Modern%20Operating%20System%20-%20Tanenbaum.pdf http://stst.elia.pub.ro/news/SO/Modern%20Operating%20System%... Enjoy!
    - brunoc 10y ago
      CS61 at Harvard covers that stuff, building your own shell (and memory management, etc) in C and it's an introductory class. There is a lot of hand holding of course but I really loved that class.
      - yolesaber 10y ago
        Harvard? Never heard of it. Good school?
        hga 10y ago
        Does not have an ABET accredited CS major, for what that's worth.
      - chubot 10y ago
        Thanks! Found it: http://cs61.seas.harvard.edu/wiki/2015/Shell http://cs61.seas.harvard.edu/wiki/2015/Shell This looks pretty comprehensive for an undergrad project actually... they have a grammar and everything, with pipes and redirects, which are definitely the most Unix-y concepts. And they talk about interrupts, although no user-defined signal handlers or anything. FWIW I ported the POSIX shell grammar to ANTLR, though I'm writing it in C++ (and prototyping the architecture in Python). ANTLR is actually incapable of expressing the lexer AFAICT... http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3...
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    Yes, he was insane. More like a pedantic jerk. It's good to know about the existence of quines. But people are (presumably) paying good money for (and more important: investing their perfectly valuable time in) their education, and there's only so much time in a systems programming class, and so much more fundamental stuff to cover (or cover more robustly). The people who really need to figure out how to write quines will no doubt find time to do so, in the dead of night, no matter what you may try to do to stop them. (And try to make them 3 bytes shorter than the shortest known version in that particular language). The rest -- they just need to know that they're out there.
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      Chill out, Franz. It was like a one day lab assignment and to be fair, I had no idea what quines were so I did learn something interesting and it led to an incredible discussion about Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust".
benwr 10y ago
The article is based on this video segment, from GJS: https://vimeo.com/151465912#t=59m36s https://vimeo.com/151465912#t=59m36s
benwr 10y ago
Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3A%2F%2Fwww.posteriorscience.net%2F%3Fp%3D206&oq=cache%3A%2F%2Fwww.posteriorscience.net%2F%3Fp%3D206 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3A%2F%2...
yarou 10y ago
I still swear by SICP and TAOCP for anyone who wants to learn CS seriously.
- mavelikara 10y ago
  For working as a professional programmer, SICP, sure. But TAOCP? Why?
  - yarou 10y ago
    I wrote that for anyone interested in learning CS seriously, I swear by those two books. I would recommend an entirely different set of books for someone who wants to work as a professional programmer. That being said, TAOCP really gave me a clear understanding of algorithmic analysis. It's a hard book, but after you finish it, you won't look at programming the same way again. Especially when it comes to design decisions for systems where efficiency is a must.
    - abc_lisper 10y ago
      So, did you read the backflap and sent the email to Bill Gates as he suggested ;).. jk.. jk How do you about working with such a hefty tome. I only use it a (light)reference. Any tips on how you went about it?
      - pakled_engineer 10y ago
        I got up early everyday and read a chapter before work and tried many of the exercises. Now I use the whole set as an almost daily reference where I work. The prelim math you can get from MITs 6.042 either on OCW or the reg school site https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring16/class-material.shtml https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring16/class-material.... if you just want to understand on an applied level what's going on. I did it in MMIX using the book 'The MMMIX Supplement' by Ruckert to check answers. Re: SICP I noticed Harvard and other schools typically have an intro to CS course then a course after in abstraction using OCaml or other functional language. The syllabuses I've found for these second semester CS intro courses looks almost identical to SICP ToC except no hand rolled compiler which is probably the single most useful chapter I've ever read in any CS book.
ng12 10y ago
Eh. Many students will have the rest of their lives to perfect the art of poking at a library. Getting the chance to play with the more sublime CS stuff is much harder outside of university.
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  the only thing that makes it harder is lack of time. but then that problem exists in university too. with one you can work on your own schedule during limited free time, and with the other you can devote a lot of time to it but it's on someone else's timeline.
- kirrent 10y ago
  Exactly, by all means force your students to use different libraries and program in modern paradigms which may be centred around different libraries but I wouldn't do a CS or SE degree where that was the focus. I didn't go to uni to learn any programming languages, it was just a side effect of everything else I learnt about computers.
- argonaut 10y ago
  Students also have the rest of their lives to learn the sublime CS stuff. Getting as many students motivated to learn CS, with Python, is a perfectly reasonable goal for a college.
  - swiley 10y ago
    That's a perfectly reasonable goal for a high school or someone performing self study. The whole point of a university is to impart knowledge of subtle things.
    - argonaut 10y ago
      The majority of CS students (including MIT) never studied CS before coming to college. Unless you propose MIT/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley/etc. only admit people to their intro CS classes who have studied CS before (chicken and egg problem, anyone?).
GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
I'm surprised and a bit dismayed to read Sussman's reasoning: "...Sussman said that in the 80s and 90s, engineers built complex systems by combining simple and well-understood parts. The goal of SICP was to provide the abstraction language for reasoning about such systems. Today, this is no longer the case. Sussman pointed out that engineers now routinely write code for complicated hardware that they don’t fully understand (and often can’t understand because of trade secrecy.) The same is true at the software level, since programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. According to Sussman, his students spend most of their time reading manuals for these libraries to figure out how to stitch them together to get a job done. He said that programming today is 'More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?''. ... " Surely graduates of MIT, of all places, would be the ones building the libraries that ordinary programmers are stitching together and would still need the ability to build complex systems from fundamental CS abstractions? I'm absolutely baffled.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  >Surely graduates of MIT, of all places, would be the ones building the libraries that ordinary programmers are stitching together and would still need the ability to build complex systems from fundamental CS abstractions? What's going on over there? Ordinary programmers everywhere are building those libraries, just like your assumed wunderkind are building programs out other people's libraries. The nature of programming has changed for >everyone<.
  - lisper 10y ago
    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 prophecy. [UPDATE:] One of the symptoms of no one understanding the fundamentals is how excited people get about things like XML and JSON, both of which are just (bad) re-inventions of S-expressions.
fintuple 10y ago
Did SICP at Berkeley. Really awesome course. Thanks MIT for not teaching it anymore. Makes me a better programmer than your new grads now. Hah!
- dimino 10y ago
  It doesn't, is the point that the folks who came up with SICP are trying to make.
  - ccalf 10y ago
    Well the real issue is defining what's better. And the worry some of us have is this new trend of grappling with increased complexity seems short-sighted; we don't like the direction it's going. As much as Sussman shows understanding of the current situation, what he's saying is also a criticism--doing this sort of ad hoc "science by poking but not really science" is the heart of the issue. And what's interesting is if you look at actual scientific research around programming, say dealing with concurrency and advanced tools like model checking, etc—all of that is very theoretical stuff that assumes you know SICP or have equivalent foundations. So it's not really an argument that theory is dying; in face of this new level of complexity in practice, perhaps we could benefit from theoretical research now more than ever.
    - dimino 10y ago
      It's hard to argue with productive results, however. If this "poking" results in valuable engineering more than SICP does, then "poking" needs to at least be seriously looked at and understood, if not outright taught to the next generation of software engineers. The real problem, I think we can all agree, is the lack of widespread specialization of degree programs. Computer Science is still the blanket degree everyone gets, when in reality, some kind of trade program is likely sufficient to train many of today's "developers" (the "pokers").
  - fintuple 10y ago
    My point is that it DOES. My single statement assertion was making that implicit assertion...
mattlong 10y ago
I really wish SICP had been a 2nd year course (with a requisite increase in difficulty) instead of my very first course in the EECS department. Not having had a ton of background in programming beforehand, I feel that a lot of what SICP has to offer was lost on me to some degree due my not appreciating it at the time. I suppose the same could probably be said for any intro course or just college in general...
- shepardrtc 10y ago
  My university used to have an Engineering Fundamentals class that all Engineering students were required to take their first year. Among several other things, it taught how to use Excel and more importantly, programming using Fortran. It wasn't in-depth, but you learned what programming was in a pretty easy environment.
  - thrownaway2424 10y ago
    We had a similar freshman pan-engineering course at Texas A&M that taught both excel and fortran among other things. Probably the most practically useful course in the entire program.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      My university offered "intro to unix". It wasn't required for anyone, but it did fill a general education requirement. It was also one of the most practical, useful classes they had. A CS student who didn't take it (probably most of them) would still pick up most of the material by osmosis, but I think that class was a great idea.
- WildUtah 10y ago
  In Math, you take Calculus. It's four semesters. Then you take Real Analysis which is the exact same material all over again, but you actually learn it and prove the theorems instead of just memorizing a few formulas and blindly applying them. It's the same in Economics where you take Micro and Macro and then junior or senior year you do the same all over again but this time you take it seriously with logical reasoning instead of just memorizing a couple stock phrase explanations. SICP wants to be both. It's a great book so maybe it can do both. But it's hard for a class to do both.
shepardrtc 10y ago
> Sussman admitted that the SICP curriculum was “more coherent” than what they have now and that they still don’t know what the right curriculum should be. The article should have led with this because I believe it would have framed the rest of it more accurately.
kulpreet 10y ago
As someone who took the replacement 6.01 Intro to EECS, I would have much rather taken 6.001 SICP. I'm sorry to say, but I feel very strongly about 6.01 being the least useful course I took at MIT.
kamran20 10y ago
So painfully true. This is one of the very first things I try to determine when I'm interviewing someone: do they have the capacity to actually figure out how things work, or are they doing something rote that they picked up along the way and will just blindly change code until "it works" when they hit a serious obstacle? And I've also worked with plenty of very senior engineers who will blow smoke up your ass when you're really down in the weeds and you want to do "root cause" analysis.
Animats 10y ago
"Programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. Some of which works. This leads to what I call ritual-taboo programming. People follow the rituals and avoid things they're told to avoid. This is reflected in programming books. Programming books were once reference manuals, which listed each function and what it did. Now, they're enormous compendiums of examples. It's sad, but MIT made the right decision. MIT used to produce people who designed elegant, perfect little jewels of code. There just aren't many jobs for those people. Algorithm design just isn't that big a deal any more. Most of the useful ones have been written and are in libraries. Who reads Knuth any more?
blktiger 10y ago
Personally, I think CS students need to understand both programming by abstraction and programming by science (poking). The abstraction stuff is important for designing maintainable code. The science stuff is important for maintaining code.
sitkack 10y ago
> “More like science. ummm, I hardly see anyone and by anyone I mean even people > 20 years of experience doing empirical research while solving problems. Maybe the _like_ needs more emphasis? We don't really teach science or the design of experiments. This is arguably the most important intellectual tool we have ever developed and it should be the core of all education. Programming by poking that I see folks doing, isn't science. It is stabbing in the dark until something appears to work. There is more to computational thinking that throwing some APIs together in a blender and making a cool demo. As a longtime Python programmer, I wish more people would start with Scheme. Most Python is written like some dynamically typed Java; people are using maybe 30% of the power of the language. I really wish I could have experienced those SICP lectures in 86.
zerr 10y ago
I was wandering what happened to those HP employees from SICP lecture videos. Where are they now, what careers they had, etc...
- gshubert17 10y ago
  I took the course in Fort Collins in the 1980s. (I think it may have been before 1986? I left HP in 1986 to stay home and raise my daughter, and went back to software development at other companies in the 1990s. I have taught college-level intro programming part-time for 25 years, and high-school level computing (including Java and Python programming) for 13 years. I was greatly impressed then with 6.001 and still am today. I have worked through most of TECS [0] within the last year, and I want to go back through SICP next year (after I retire :-) [0] The Elements of Computer Systems http://nand2tetris.org http://nand2tetris.org
Hydraulix989 10y ago
That's a shame because the theoretical grounding that comes from SICP is enough of a clue to tell you why black box library X is crashing, runs too slow, lacks feature Y, etc. and maybe even enough of a clue to help you modify/hack it to get feature Z as a workaround.
rhinoceraptor 10y ago
If you haven't watched the SICP video lectures [1], they are really great. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY
jdmoreira 10y ago
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 Cocoa Touch framework whose source I can't even read because it's closed source. 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. 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...
- eric-hu 10y ago
  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.
- kajecounterhack 10y ago
  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.
  - nextos 10y ago
    I think he doesn't necessarily imply anything about being high or low in the chain. But about beauty and understanding. SICP is one example, but I bet it's even possible to be happy coding GUIs or any other rather mundane things if one does it with an elegant toolset. For example, Oz comes to mind. Some modern tools are not pleasing to use, often because architectures are a mess. Things move forward too quickly.
varadg 10y ago
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)?
- cbHXBY1D 10y ago
  Yes, I believe so. I think Brian Harvey puts it aptly, "The big ideas in the book — the ones that alumni in the real world tell us they’re using in their work — express themselves best in Scheme." [1] https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/proglang.html https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/proglang.html
  - varadg 10y ago
    Ahh. Do you think it will really add value to re-take the course under Scheme exclusively?
kreek 10y ago
If you're learning Clojure there's a site/book that incorporates much of the original SICP text: http://www.sicpdistilled.com/ http://www.sicpdistilled.com/
jeffreyrogers 10y ago
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.
- rlt3 10y ago
  The problem is that most programmers today aren't apart of either of those groups but apart of a third, totally separate group: programmers who pick and prod and then glue lines of code together.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >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). Many of us are in both groups, which is how stuff like Rust came about.
  - jeffreyrogers 10y ago
    True, but the number of people who are good at both is very small :)
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      Really? Well, more money for us then.
- 10y ago
jeffreyrogers 10y ago
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.
wellpast 10y ago
> The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant. Nowadays, we do programming by poking. I imagine many of us do programming by poking. But the skill set referred to here is essential if you're going to build (create/construct) a complex system or architecture. To say the skill set is irrelevant is to say we as an industry are doing things more or less right. But when I look around, I see that we're making a huge mess of things everywhere or are at least sorely inefficient when it comes to building and growing systems. That is to say, I believe (I know) that we could be doing much much better than we are now -- and I believe the skill set being dismissed here is a large key to doing better. So I'm sad to see it dismissed like this.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
chris_wot 10y ago
The book can be found here: https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/sarabander/sicp-pdf/master/sicp.pdf https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/sarabander/sicp-pd...
ehudla 10y ago
There's a quote I love from the book "The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT": Freshman double E's take six double oh one (a.k.a. six double no fun) to learn to program in LISP... This is also where they begin to leave the rest of the world behind them in their ability solve problems and make things work. He goes on to describe how the course instills the virtues and limits of abstraction.
- ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
  Would you recommend it for people thinking about institutional culture/school design?
  - ehudla 10y ago
    The MIT book? No, it's just a fun book about MIT culture, the analysis doesn't run very deep IIRC.
- njbooher 10y ago
  I love that book.
erikb 10y ago
I think it's also very natural for this time that "[the past solution] was “more coherent” than what they have now and that they still don’t know what the right [current solution] should be." If you ask around you that's how most people feel about their job, their families, some more advanced people even feel that way about their gender, political position, life goal, philosophy.
reuven 10y ago
Wow. I took 6.001 as an undergrad at MIT. It changed my view of software forever. Years later, I now spend most of my time training programmers at hi-tech companies in Python. The ideas that I got from 6.001 are pervasive in my training, and are fundamental (I think) for programmers to understand if they want to do their jobs well. Given that I teach tons of Python, you might think that I'm happy that they switched to Python as the language of instruction. That's not the case; I think that Lisp offers more options for thinking about programming in different ways. One of the great things about 6.001 was that it didn't try to teach you how to program for a job. It taught you how to think like a programmer, so that you could easily learn any language or technology they threw at you. Oh, well.
fvt 10y ago
Some day we will recognize that some areas of "programming" are very different and require different skill sets, and eventually different titles. We tend to call everything "software engineering" so that everybody can feel proud of such a title ("I'm an engineer"), but engineering is certainly not about figuring out how to vertically center divs with CSS (and it's also not about proving algebra theorems either -- even if it can be essential when it comes to specific problems that require it). I can't imagine Linux and PostgreSQL being built without "science", they use a lot of it, and I'm pretty sure the authors all have read SICP and those theoretical books. Poking at things proved to be efficient to building things quickly, but it's just not how one builds critical systems/software that are robust, efficient and maintainable.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  Software Engineering is more about methodically solving software problems than it is about which problems are being solved. A web developer who writes rigorous formal tests for a new page is engineering just as hard as an embedded developer writing rigorous acceptance tests for a board-support package. The engineering comes from the rigor and the fact that there is a controlled process for how software features get implemented.
  - fvt 10y ago
    I agree with that. The engineering process can be applied on every type of problem. Yet, for that specific web dev problem, I haven't seen any way of formally testing the rendering web pages, which would make it consistent on every browsers. The testing process (almost) always leave that up to the developers themselves, and refreshing pages is the norm.
- anarazel 10y ago
  > I can't imagine Linux and PostgreSQL being built without "science", they use a lot of it, and I'm pretty sure the authors all have read SICP and those theoretical books. Unless you restrict "authors" to the people that worked on the original Postgres95 (and maybe not even then), I'm certain that that's not generally the case (being a postgres committer and not having read SICP).
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Poke all you like. I'll just be over here writing software that isn't a broken pile of hacks. SICP is one of the most important books I haven't read. It's actually on my shelf right now. I still haven't finished it. The fact is, as a self-taught programmer, programming is intimidating. I can reason about code, and write it, and understand it if I squint at it long enough, but I still choke on any production code I read, and have trouble solving complex problems. SICP is a book all about this. It's about building better abstractions, and despite having not yet finished it, is probably the most helpful books on programming I've read. Many books can teach you how to program. SICP teaches you how to program /well/, and why. Along with The Lambda Papers, it taught just how powerful Scheme could be. And I maintain that Lambda the Ultimate Declarative contains the only good explanation of what a continuation DOES. It was the book that made me want to go to MIT. I don't know if I'll ever go there (I'm still in high school), but if the people there are advocating "programming by poking," it probably wouldn't be worth my time. This book changed my life, and I haven't even finished it yet. It should be Required Reading™, and the thought of doing it in Java makes me sick. And not just because I despise Java. Java is probably the worst language for this sort of book. SICP is an exploration of programming paradigms and concepts. Java is married to one set of paradigms and concepts, and won't budge an inch against even a hydrogen bomb. Besides, imagine a metacircular evaluator in Java. Yuck.
bparanj 10y ago
Great concept! Soon monkeys will do all the poking. Humans can just watch.
techonup 10y ago
This isn't entirely accurate- SICP is still taught as a 4-week intensive during MIT's IAP (January) term. It doesn't fulfill any requirements, but the student evaluations are excellent (averaged a 6.7/7 over the last two years). http://web.mit.edu/alexmv/6.037/ http://web.mit.edu/alexmv/6.037/ http://student.mit.edu/catalog/search.cgi?search=6.037 http://student.mit.edu/catalog/search.cgi?search=6.037
vu3rdd 10y ago
I wish the original course is offered in an alternate platform like edX.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  The course material from 2005 (original 6.001) is available on OCW at MIT, including videos of the lectures. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/index.htm http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... That's an older and less polished online courseware system than edX, but it's perfectly workable. There are also VERY old videos of Sussman himself giving the .001 lectures. Those were easy to find, but I'd recommend the OCW site over the original lectures.
shitgoose 10y ago
"in the 80s and 90s, engineers built complex systems by combining simple and well-understood parts.... Today, this is no longer the case." yep:(
dschiptsov 10y ago
Yes yes. Old school, understanding based, composable via interfaces components gave us things like R4RS, Plan9, git, LuaJIT, nginx, Erlang, you name it. That packing or poking crappy mindset produced so called eneterprise software with all its ole, jdbc, javaee, corba, NodeJS, and all the other meaningless bloatware. BTW, this a human-universal law. Lack of understanding of grounded in reality fundamental principles will enivetably produce piles of abstract nonsense, be it philosophy (of Hegel), [Java] programming, theoretical physics or even math (500 pages Coq "proofs" of abstract nonsense). There is the law of cancer (in terms of 4chan) - any branch of human endeavor will be ruined with enough of cosplaying idiots. BTW2: teaching of principles is too difficult, because, like a good philosophy, which is a study of principles, it requires extraordinary trained and lucid mind habitually trying to separate underlying principles from human-made "higher" or "pure" nonsense. This habitual mental hygiene, which guards the principles from contamination by popular memes and waves of mass hysteria is very rare trait, impossible to sell or monetize. To teach it requires a similar mindset in students. Packers would be unable to grasp what is it I am talking about. The Motorcycle Maintenance book, and that part of Atlas about modern philosophers will be a much better illustration.
topkekz 10y ago
Hal Abelson on the end of SICP at MIT (2011) http://codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/ http://codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/
Const-me 10y ago
Looks like another face of a centuries-old debate between theoretical and experimental science. The theoretical scientists play with abstractions they fully understand. Experimental scientists poke at things they don’t fully understand. They tend not to do well with each other. When computers were in the infancy, they were viewed primarily as a scientific tools to crunch numbers and play with abstraction. That’s the theory-oriented view that I think is shared by the SICP authors. Then computers became complex, fast, and capable of doing much more than crunching numbers and evaluating those S-expressions. While you can view a modern web browser, or MS Word, or a videogame, as a program for a Turing complete machine, this does not mean you should. Too little value in that: sure there’re instructions and state, but now what? More experiment-oriented mindset usually works better with those kind of problems.
bawana 10y ago
This is the way of real life. We breathe, eat, excrete all without understanding or knowing. We poke at our bodies with junk food, exercise, video games, and other stimuli. Sometimes we achieve the desired effect, most times not. We still do not really know how we work. Poking at complexity is ALWAYS how science was done. And the high priests of computer science strove to build a corpus that was intimidating, complex and beautiful. They tried to be gods and birth a new form of life. That computer scientists applied Socratic and Aristotelian principles to their framework is hubris. Human individuals really cannot be gods to machines that are useful. We have constructed masses of spaghetti code into libraries that no one has the time to read or understand and it is our own fault. These are tools and should have been kept simple and open and easy. Perhaps AI will evolve to save its parents. I have a dream of the day when I can talk to Alexa, and write code for her in English just by speaking. Her built in projector would show me what I said. My words would be translated into correct Python, c++, or JavaScript. She would highlight errors that would lead to build failures. Point out race conditions. And tell jokes along the way.
bawana 10y ago
This is the way of real life. We breathe, eat, excrete all without understanding or knowing. We poke at our bodies with junk food, exercise, video games, and other stimuli. Sometimes we achieve the desired effect, most times not. We still do not really know how we work. Poking at complexity is ALWAYS how science was done. And the high priests of computer science strove to build a corpus that was intimidating, complex and beautiful. They tried to be gods and birth a new form of life. That computer scientists applied Socratic and Aristotelian principles to their framework is hubris. Human individuals really cannot be gods to machines that are useful. We have constructed masses of spaghetti code into libraries that no one has the time to read or understand and it is our own fault. These are tools and should have been kept simple and open and easy. Perhaps AI will evolve to save its parents. I have a dream of the day when I can talk to Alexa, and write code for her in English just by speaking. Her built in projector would show me what I said. My words would be translated into correct Python, c++, or JavaScript. She would highlight errors that would lead to build failures. Point out race conditions. And tell jokes along the way.
linhchi 10y ago
I'm not techie, so i'd like to ask if my interpretation is ok. The switch from scheme to python is in the tidal change of conceptual thinking? Previously, giants & pioneers approach AI systematically, w consistent logic and clean structure (like maths language). However, for now, the narrative shifts to "poking around, hoping to poke the right thing"? I use Racket & its thinking for research. I think that structured thinking is still intellectually important. So it'd still survive, as there'd still be people sticking w it.

478 points by brunoc 10y ago

All that said, it is still worthwhile to work through all of SICP, if you want a deeper understanding of how certain tools work. Writing your own interpreter is a very rewarding experience.

fsloth 10y ago
I think going through SICP and most of all, writing my own interpreter, made me an all around better programmer. I noticed my systems thinking clarified considerably. Not in an aloof way but by providing actual actionable insights on how to implement and structure things.
yolesaber 10y ago
Having to write my own shell in C for my operating systems class absolutely blew my mind. And then after that my professor made us implement a quine in the shell we just wrote. Yes, he was insane.
- umanwizard 10y ago
  Genuinely curious: what are some of the interesting things in writing your own shell? Was it the programming language interpretation aspect, or having to learn the kernel's API for forking tasks and redirecting, etc.?
  - flying_kangaroo 10y ago
    Not OP but also had to write my own shell, as well as the kernel APIs for forking and whatnot. The kernel APIs are definitely interesting, but I think the biggest dopamine rush was once the way to parse and structure commands "clicked" and suddenly shells made a whole lot of sense.
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      also being able to look at the source code for a kernel and saying "ah ha! so that's where the process table is created" is also a lot of fun...kind of like uncovering ancient artifacts and learning to read the glyphs
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    Well it was my first low level experience so a lot of it was new to me - I hadn't even used C before so pointers alone were a revelation of sorts. I was blown away by the idea of interpretation and then once we delved into forking and processes (and zombie processes), well I truly went down the rabbit hole. It was really cool implementing your own system hooks with Minix - being able to press F12 to get a formatted tables of all running system calls was supremely satisfying. I fully appreciated how complicated and yet in a way beautiful OSes could be and it forced me to learn how to sweat the small stuff and build good software from the ground up.
- dnautics 10y ago
  this is going to sound crazy, but in eighth grade I took a CS class where they had us create an interpreter in lisp. It was amazing, and I haven't done anything quite like it since (though dan boneh's crypto class on coursera was close).
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    That sounds fun! Lisp is great for that because of its code-as-data principle (I use clojure in my day job and it makes dealing with structured data like JSON an absolute breeze). Did you go to an advanced school or something?
    - dnautics 10y ago
      well, i started coding in 1st grade (logo, then basic) but this was a summer program hosted by Johns Hopkins. It was highly theoretical - we learned about DFAs, NFAs, epsilon-NFAs, and turing machines.
      - yolesaber 10y ago
        Awesome! I started in the 5th grade with Perl (lol) and went to a bunch of summer programs but they were more hands-on and programming based. Very cool. I learned about state machines when I was 16 and would draw my own really complicated ones for fun haha.
      - s_p_lee 10y ago
        Wow, I had completely forgotten about writing that interpreter for the PURPLE language [1] in that class. Thanks for the memories! [1] http://www.mattababy.org/~belmonte/Teaching/CS1/PURPLE_project.html http://www.mattababy.org/~belmonte/Teaching/CS1/PURPLE_proje...
        dnautics 10y ago
        Were you in that class with me? drop a line. Would love to hear from someone else in that class!
- chubot 10y ago
  Which class/university was it? Any chance the materials are online? I'm actually writing my own shell now; I'd be interested to compare :) The fork/exec/pipe/dup calls are definitely an unusual and powerful paradigm. I think too many programmers don't know this because we were brainwashed to make "portable" programs, and that's the least portable part of Unix.
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    Operating Systems at Bard College, a decidedly not top tier CS school but I still learned a fair bit :) The materials, as far as I know, are not available online. But we used Tannenbaum's book which you can read for free here - http://stst.elia.pub.ro/news/SO/Modern%20Operating%20System%20-%20Tanenbaum.pdf http://stst.elia.pub.ro/news/SO/Modern%20Operating%20System%... Enjoy!
  - brunoc 10y ago
    CS61 at Harvard covers that stuff, building your own shell (and memory management, etc) in C and it's an introductory class. There is a lot of hand holding of course but I really loved that class.
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      Harvard? Never heard of it. Good school?
      - hga 10y ago
        Does not have an ABET accredited CS major, for what that's worth.
    - chubot 10y ago
      Thanks! Found it: http://cs61.seas.harvard.edu/wiki/2015/Shell http://cs61.seas.harvard.edu/wiki/2015/Shell This looks pretty comprehensive for an undergrad project actually... they have a grammar and everything, with pipes and redirects, which are definitely the most Unix-y concepts. And they talk about interrupts, although no user-defined signal handlers or anything. FWIW I ported the POSIX shell grammar to ANTLR, though I'm writing it in C++ (and prototyping the architecture in Python). ANTLR is actually incapable of expressing the lexer AFAICT... http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3...
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  Yes, he was insane. More like a pedantic jerk. It's good to know about the existence of quines. But people are (presumably) paying good money for (and more important: investing their perfectly valuable time in) their education, and there's only so much time in a systems programming class, and so much more fundamental stuff to cover (or cover more robustly). The people who really need to figure out how to write quines will no doubt find time to do so, in the dead of night, no matter what you may try to do to stop them. (And try to make them 3 bytes shorter than the shortest known version in that particular language). The rest -- they just need to know that they're out there.
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    Chill out, Franz. It was like a one day lab assignment and to be fair, I had no idea what quines were so I did learn something interesting and it led to an incredible discussion about Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust".

benwr 10y ago

The article is based on this video segment, from GJS: https://vimeo.com/151465912#t=59m36s https://vimeo.com/151465912#t=59m36s

benwr 10y ago

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3A%2F%2Fwww.posteriorscience.net%2F%3Fp%3D206&oq=cache%3A%2F%2Fwww.posteriorscience.net%2F%3Fp%3D206 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3A%2F%2...

yarou 10y ago

I still swear by SICP and TAOCP for anyone who wants to learn CS seriously.

mavelikara 10y ago
For working as a professional programmer, SICP, sure. But TAOCP? Why?
- yarou 10y ago
  I wrote that for anyone interested in learning CS seriously, I swear by those two books. I would recommend an entirely different set of books for someone who wants to work as a professional programmer. That being said, TAOCP really gave me a clear understanding of algorithmic analysis. It's a hard book, but after you finish it, you won't look at programming the same way again. Especially when it comes to design decisions for systems where efficiency is a must.
  - abc_lisper 10y ago
    So, did you read the backflap and sent the email to Bill Gates as he suggested ;).. jk.. jk How do you about working with such a hefty tome. I only use it a (light)reference. Any tips on how you went about it?
    - pakled_engineer 10y ago
      I got up early everyday and read a chapter before work and tried many of the exercises. Now I use the whole set as an almost daily reference where I work. The prelim math you can get from MITs 6.042 either on OCW or the reg school site https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring16/class-material.shtml https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring16/class-material.... if you just want to understand on an applied level what's going on. I did it in MMIX using the book 'The MMMIX Supplement' by Ruckert to check answers. Re: SICP I noticed Harvard and other schools typically have an intro to CS course then a course after in abstraction using OCaml or other functional language. The syllabuses I've found for these second semester CS intro courses looks almost identical to SICP ToC except no hand rolled compiler which is probably the single most useful chapter I've ever read in any CS book.

ng12 10y ago

Eh. Many students will have the rest of their lives to perfect the art of poking at a library. Getting the chance to play with the more sublime CS stuff is much harder outside of university.

pasquinelli 10y ago
the only thing that makes it harder is lack of time. but then that problem exists in university too. with one you can work on your own schedule during limited free time, and with the other you can devote a lot of time to it but it's on someone else's timeline.
kirrent 10y ago
Exactly, by all means force your students to use different libraries and program in modern paradigms which may be centred around different libraries but I wouldn't do a CS or SE degree where that was the focus. I didn't go to uni to learn any programming languages, it was just a side effect of everything else I learnt about computers.
argonaut 10y ago
Students also have the rest of their lives to learn the sublime CS stuff. Getting as many students motivated to learn CS, with Python, is a perfectly reasonable goal for a college.
- swiley 10y ago
  That's a perfectly reasonable goal for a high school or someone performing self study. The whole point of a university is to impart knowledge of subtle things.
  - argonaut 10y ago
    The majority of CS students (including MIT) never studied CS before coming to college. Unless you propose MIT/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley/etc. only admit people to their intro CS classes who have studied CS before (chicken and egg problem, anyone?).

GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago

I'm surprised and a bit dismayed to read Sussman's reasoning: "...Sussman said that in the 80s and 90s, engineers built complex systems by combining simple and well-understood parts. The goal of SICP was to provide the abstraction language for reasoning about such systems. Today, this is no longer the case. Sussman pointed out that engineers now routinely write code for complicated hardware that they don’t fully understand (and often can’t understand because of trade secrecy.) The same is true at the software level, since programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. According to Sussman, his students spend most of their time reading manuals for these libraries to figure out how to stitch them together to get a job done. He said that programming today is 'More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?''. ... " Surely graduates of MIT, of all places, would be the ones building the libraries that ordinary programmers are stitching together and would still need the ability to build complex systems from fundamental CS abstractions? I'm absolutely baffled.

WalterSear 10y ago
>Surely graduates of MIT, of all places, would be the ones building the libraries that ordinary programmers are stitching together and would still need the ability to build complex systems from fundamental CS abstractions? What's going on over there? Ordinary programmers everywhere are building those libraries, just like your assumed wunderkind are building programs out other people's libraries. The nature of programming has changed for >everyone<.
- lisper 10y ago
  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 prophecy. [UPDATE:] One of the symptoms of no one understanding the fundamentals is how excited people get about things like XML and JSON, both of which are just (bad) re-inventions of S-expressions.

fintuple 10y ago

Did SICP at Berkeley. Really awesome course. Thanks MIT for not teaching it anymore. Makes me a better programmer than your new grads now. Hah!

dimino 10y ago
It doesn't, is the point that the folks who came up with SICP are trying to make.
- ccalf 10y ago
  Well the real issue is defining what's better. And the worry some of us have is this new trend of grappling with increased complexity seems short-sighted; we don't like the direction it's going. As much as Sussman shows understanding of the current situation, what he's saying is also a criticism--doing this sort of ad hoc "science by poking but not really science" is the heart of the issue. And what's interesting is if you look at actual scientific research around programming, say dealing with concurrency and advanced tools like model checking, etc—all of that is very theoretical stuff that assumes you know SICP or have equivalent foundations. So it's not really an argument that theory is dying; in face of this new level of complexity in practice, perhaps we could benefit from theoretical research now more than ever.
  - dimino 10y ago
    It's hard to argue with productive results, however. If this "poking" results in valuable engineering more than SICP does, then "poking" needs to at least be seriously looked at and understood, if not outright taught to the next generation of software engineers. The real problem, I think we can all agree, is the lack of widespread specialization of degree programs. Computer Science is still the blanket degree everyone gets, when in reality, some kind of trade program is likely sufficient to train many of today's "developers" (the "pokers").
- fintuple 10y ago
  My point is that it DOES. My single statement assertion was making that implicit assertion...

mattlong 10y ago

I really wish SICP had been a 2nd year course (with a requisite increase in difficulty) instead of my very first course in the EECS department. Not having had a ton of background in programming beforehand, I feel that a lot of what SICP has to offer was lost on me to some degree due my not appreciating it at the time. I suppose the same could probably be said for any intro course or just college in general...

shepardrtc 10y ago
My university used to have an Engineering Fundamentals class that all Engineering students were required to take their first year. Among several other things, it taught how to use Excel and more importantly, programming using Fortran. It wasn't in-depth, but you learned what programming was in a pretty easy environment.
- thrownaway2424 10y ago
  We had a similar freshman pan-engineering course at Texas A&M that taught both excel and fortran among other things. Probably the most practically useful course in the entire program.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    My university offered "intro to unix". It wasn't required for anyone, but it did fill a general education requirement. It was also one of the most practical, useful classes they had. A CS student who didn't take it (probably most of them) would still pick up most of the material by osmosis, but I think that class was a great idea.
WildUtah 10y ago
In Math, you take Calculus. It's four semesters. Then you take Real Analysis which is the exact same material all over again, but you actually learn it and prove the theorems instead of just memorizing a few formulas and blindly applying them. It's the same in Economics where you take Micro and Macro and then junior or senior year you do the same all over again but this time you take it seriously with logical reasoning instead of just memorizing a couple stock phrase explanations. SICP wants to be both. It's a great book so maybe it can do both. But it's hard for a class to do both.

shepardrtc 10y ago

> Sussman admitted that the SICP curriculum was “more coherent” than what they have now and that they still don’t know what the right curriculum should be. The article should have led with this because I believe it would have framed the rest of it more accurately.

kulpreet 10y ago

As someone who took the replacement 6.01 Intro to EECS, I would have much rather taken 6.001 SICP. I'm sorry to say, but I feel very strongly about 6.01 being the least useful course I took at MIT.

kamran20 10y ago

So painfully true. This is one of the very first things I try to determine when I'm interviewing someone: do they have the capacity to actually figure out how things work, or are they doing something rote that they picked up along the way and will just blindly change code until "it works" when they hit a serious obstacle? And I've also worked with plenty of very senior engineers who will blow smoke up your ass when you're really down in the weeds and you want to do "root cause" analysis.

Animats 10y ago

"Programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. Some of which works. This leads to what I call ritual-taboo programming. People follow the rituals and avoid things they're told to avoid. This is reflected in programming books. Programming books were once reference manuals, which listed each function and what it did. Now, they're enormous compendiums of examples. It's sad, but MIT made the right decision. MIT used to produce people who designed elegant, perfect little jewels of code. There just aren't many jobs for those people. Algorithm design just isn't that big a deal any more. Most of the useful ones have been written and are in libraries. Who reads Knuth any more?

blktiger 10y ago

Personally, I think CS students need to understand both programming by abstraction and programming by science (poking). The abstraction stuff is important for designing maintainable code. The science stuff is important for maintaining code.

sitkack 10y ago

> “More like science. ummm, I hardly see anyone and by anyone I mean even people > 20 years of experience doing empirical research while solving problems. Maybe the _like_ needs more emphasis? We don't really teach science or the design of experiments. This is arguably the most important intellectual tool we have ever developed and it should be the core of all education. Programming by poking that I see folks doing, isn't science. It is stabbing in the dark until something appears to work. There is more to computational thinking that throwing some APIs together in a blender and making a cool demo. As a longtime Python programmer, I wish more people would start with Scheme. Most Python is written like some dynamically typed Java; people are using maybe 30% of the power of the language. I really wish I could have experienced those SICP lectures in 86.

zerr 10y ago

I was wandering what happened to those HP employees from SICP lecture videos. Where are they now, what careers they had, etc...

gshubert17 10y ago
I took the course in Fort Collins in the 1980s. (I think it may have been before 1986? I left HP in 1986 to stay home and raise my daughter, and went back to software development at other companies in the 1990s. I have taught college-level intro programming part-time for 25 years, and high-school level computing (including Java and Python programming) for 13 years. I was greatly impressed then with 6.001 and still am today. I have worked through most of TECS [0] within the last year, and I want to go back through SICP next year (after I retire :-) [0] The Elements of Computer Systems http://nand2tetris.org http://nand2tetris.org

Hydraulix989 10y ago

That's a shame because the theoretical grounding that comes from SICP is enough of a clue to tell you why black box library X is crashing, runs too slow, lacks feature Y, etc. and maybe even enough of a clue to help you modify/hack it to get feature Z as a workaround.

rhinoceraptor 10y ago

If you haven't watched the SICP video lectures [1], they are really great. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY

jdmoreira 10y ago

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 Cocoa Touch framework whose source I can't even read because it's closed source. 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. 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...

eric-hu 10y ago
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.
kajecounterhack 10y ago
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.
- nextos 10y ago
  I think he doesn't necessarily imply anything about being high or low in the chain. But about beauty and understanding. SICP is one example, but I bet it's even possible to be happy coding GUIs or any other rather mundane things if one does it with an elegant toolset. For example, Oz comes to mind. Some modern tools are not pleasing to use, often because architectures are a mess. Things move forward too quickly.

varadg 10y ago

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)?

cbHXBY1D 10y ago
Yes, I believe so. I think Brian Harvey puts it aptly, "The big ideas in the book — the ones that alumni in the real world tell us they’re using in their work — express themselves best in Scheme." [1] https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/proglang.html https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/proglang.html
- varadg 10y ago
  Ahh. Do you think it will really add value to re-take the course under Scheme exclusively?

kreek 10y ago

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

jeffreyrogers 10y ago

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.

rlt3 10y ago
The problem is that most programmers today aren't apart of either of those groups but apart of a third, totally separate group: programmers who pick and prod and then glue lines of code together.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>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). Many of us are in both groups, which is how stuff like Rust came about.
- jeffreyrogers 10y ago
  True, but the number of people who are good at both is very small :)
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    Really? Well, more money for us then.
10y ago

jeffreyrogers 10y ago

wellpast 10y ago

> The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant. Nowadays, we do programming by poking. I imagine many of us do programming by poking. But the skill set referred to here is essential if you're going to build (create/construct) a complex system or architecture. To say the skill set is irrelevant is to say we as an industry are doing things more or less right. But when I look around, I see that we're making a huge mess of things everywhere or are at least sorely inefficient when it comes to building and growing systems. That is to say, I believe (I know) that we could be doing much much better than we are now -- and I believe the skill set being dismissed here is a large key to doing better. So I'm sad to see it dismissed like this.

deleted 10y ago

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chris_wot 10y ago

The book can be found here: https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/sarabander/sicp-pdf/master/sicp.pdf https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/sarabander/sicp-pd...

ehudla 10y ago

There's a quote I love from the book "The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT": Freshman double E's take six double oh one (a.k.a. six double no fun) to learn to program in LISP... This is also where they begin to leave the rest of the world behind them in their ability solve problems and make things work. He goes on to describe how the course instills the virtues and limits of abstraction.

ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
Would you recommend it for people thinking about institutional culture/school design?
- ehudla 10y ago
  The MIT book? No, it's just a fun book about MIT culture, the analysis doesn't run very deep IIRC.
njbooher 10y ago
I love that book.

erikb 10y ago

I think it's also very natural for this time that "[the past solution] was “more coherent” than what they have now and that they still don’t know what the right [current solution] should be." If you ask around you that's how most people feel about their job, their families, some more advanced people even feel that way about their gender, political position, life goal, philosophy.

reuven 10y ago

Wow. I took 6.001 as an undergrad at MIT. It changed my view of software forever. Years later, I now spend most of my time training programmers at hi-tech companies in Python. The ideas that I got from 6.001 are pervasive in my training, and are fundamental (I think) for programmers to understand if they want to do their jobs well. Given that I teach tons of Python, you might think that I'm happy that they switched to Python as the language of instruction. That's not the case; I think that Lisp offers more options for thinking about programming in different ways. One of the great things about 6.001 was that it didn't try to teach you how to program for a job. It taught you how to think like a programmer, so that you could easily learn any language or technology they threw at you. Oh, well.

fvt 10y ago

Some day we will recognize that some areas of "programming" are very different and require different skill sets, and eventually different titles. We tend to call everything "software engineering" so that everybody can feel proud of such a title ("I'm an engineer"), but engineering is certainly not about figuring out how to vertically center divs with CSS (and it's also not about proving algebra theorems either -- even if it can be essential when it comes to specific problems that require it). I can't imagine Linux and PostgreSQL being built without "science", they use a lot of it, and I'm pretty sure the authors all have read SICP and those theoretical books. Poking at things proved to be efficient to building things quickly, but it's just not how one builds critical systems/software that are robust, efficient and maintainable.

jschwartzi 10y ago
Software Engineering is more about methodically solving software problems than it is about which problems are being solved. A web developer who writes rigorous formal tests for a new page is engineering just as hard as an embedded developer writing rigorous acceptance tests for a board-support package. The engineering comes from the rigor and the fact that there is a controlled process for how software features get implemented.
- fvt 10y ago
  I agree with that. The engineering process can be applied on every type of problem. Yet, for that specific web dev problem, I haven't seen any way of formally testing the rendering web pages, which would make it consistent on every browsers. The testing process (almost) always leave that up to the developers themselves, and refreshing pages is the norm.
anarazel 10y ago
> I can't imagine Linux and PostgreSQL being built without "science", they use a lot of it, and I'm pretty sure the authors all have read SICP and those theoretical books. Unless you restrict "authors" to the people that worked on the original Postgres95 (and maybe not even then), I'm certain that that's not generally the case (being a postgres committer and not having read SICP).

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Poke all you like. I'll just be over here writing software that isn't a broken pile of hacks. SICP is one of the most important books I haven't read. It's actually on my shelf right now. I still haven't finished it. The fact is, as a self-taught programmer, programming is intimidating. I can reason about code, and write it, and understand it if I squint at it long enough, but I still choke on any production code I read, and have trouble solving complex problems. SICP is a book all about this. It's about building better abstractions, and despite having not yet finished it, is probably the most helpful books on programming I've read. Many books can teach you how to program. SICP teaches you how to program /well/, and why. Along with The Lambda Papers, it taught just how powerful Scheme could be. And I maintain that Lambda the Ultimate Declarative contains the only good explanation of what a continuation DOES. It was the book that made me want to go to MIT. I don't know if I'll ever go there (I'm still in high school), but if the people there are advocating "programming by poking," it probably wouldn't be worth my time. This book changed my life, and I haven't even finished it yet. It should be Required Reading™, and the thought of doing it in Java makes me sick. And not just because I despise Java. Java is probably the worst language for this sort of book. SICP is an exploration of programming paradigms and concepts. Java is married to one set of paradigms and concepts, and won't budge an inch against even a hydrogen bomb. Besides, imagine a metacircular evaluator in Java. Yuck.

bparanj 10y ago

Great concept! Soon monkeys will do all the poking. Humans can just watch.

techonup 10y ago

This isn't entirely accurate- SICP is still taught as a 4-week intensive during MIT's IAP (January) term. It doesn't fulfill any requirements, but the student evaluations are excellent (averaged a 6.7/7 over the last two years). http://web.mit.edu/alexmv/6.037/ http://web.mit.edu/alexmv/6.037/ http://student.mit.edu/catalog/search.cgi?search=6.037 http://student.mit.edu/catalog/search.cgi?search=6.037

vu3rdd 10y ago

I wish the original course is offered in an alternate platform like edX.

sokoloff 10y ago
The course material from 2005 (original 6.001) is available on OCW at MIT, including videos of the lectures. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/index.htm http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... That's an older and less polished online courseware system than edX, but it's perfectly workable. There are also VERY old videos of Sussman himself giving the .001 lectures. Those were easy to find, but I'd recommend the OCW site over the original lectures.

shitgoose 10y ago

"in the 80s and 90s, engineers built complex systems by combining simple and well-understood parts.... Today, this is no longer the case." yep:(

dschiptsov 10y ago

Yes yes. Old school, understanding based, composable via interfaces components gave us things like R4RS, Plan9, git, LuaJIT, nginx, Erlang, you name it. That packing or poking crappy mindset produced so called eneterprise software with all its ole, jdbc, javaee, corba, NodeJS, and all the other meaningless bloatware. BTW, this a human-universal law. Lack of understanding of grounded in reality fundamental principles will enivetably produce piles of abstract nonsense, be it philosophy (of Hegel), [Java] programming, theoretical physics or even math (500 pages Coq "proofs" of abstract nonsense). There is the law of cancer (in terms of 4chan) - any branch of human endeavor will be ruined with enough of cosplaying idiots. BTW2: teaching of principles is too difficult, because, like a good philosophy, which is a study of principles, it requires extraordinary trained and lucid mind habitually trying to separate underlying principles from human-made "higher" or "pure" nonsense. This habitual mental hygiene, which guards the principles from contamination by popular memes and waves of mass hysteria is very rare trait, impossible to sell or monetize. To teach it requires a similar mindset in students. Packers would be unable to grasp what is it I am talking about. The Motorcycle Maintenance book, and that part of Atlas about modern philosophers will be a much better illustration.

topkekz 10y ago

Hal Abelson on the end of SICP at MIT (2011) http://codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/ http://codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/

Const-me 10y ago

Looks like another face of a centuries-old debate between theoretical and experimental science. The theoretical scientists play with abstractions they fully understand. Experimental scientists poke at things they don’t fully understand. They tend not to do well with each other. When computers were in the infancy, they were viewed primarily as a scientific tools to crunch numbers and play with abstraction. That’s the theory-oriented view that I think is shared by the SICP authors. Then computers became complex, fast, and capable of doing much more than crunching numbers and evaluating those S-expressions. While you can view a modern web browser, or MS Word, or a videogame, as a program for a Turing complete machine, this does not mean you should. Too little value in that: sure there’re instructions and state, but now what? More experiment-oriented mindset usually works better with those kind of problems.

bawana 10y ago

This is the way of real life. We breathe, eat, excrete all without understanding or knowing. We poke at our bodies with junk food, exercise, video games, and other stimuli. Sometimes we achieve the desired effect, most times not. We still do not really know how we work. Poking at complexity is ALWAYS how science was done. And the high priests of computer science strove to build a corpus that was intimidating, complex and beautiful. They tried to be gods and birth a new form of life. That computer scientists applied Socratic and Aristotelian principles to their framework is hubris. Human individuals really cannot be gods to machines that are useful. We have constructed masses of spaghetti code into libraries that no one has the time to read or understand and it is our own fault. These are tools and should have been kept simple and open and easy. Perhaps AI will evolve to save its parents. I have a dream of the day when I can talk to Alexa, and write code for her in English just by speaking. Her built in projector would show me what I said. My words would be translated into correct Python, c++, or JavaScript. She would highlight errors that would lead to build failures. Point out race conditions. And tell jokes along the way.

bawana 10y ago

linhchi 10y ago

I'm not techie, so i'd like to ask if my interpretation is ok. The switch from scheme to python is in the tidal change of conceptual thinking? Previously, giants & pioneers approach AI systematically, w consistent logic and clean structure (like maths language). However, for now, the narrative shifts to "poking around, hoping to poke the right thing"? I use Racket & its thinking for research. I think that structured thinking is still intellectually important. So it'd still survive, as there'd still be people sticking w it.