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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

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.
  - Scramblejams 10y ago
    I'm not sure that it's because no one understands the fundamentals any more. (Which, BTW, the latter part I agree with.) I think it's because everything's gotten too large. You need to use too many frameworks and too many libraries just to get anything done today, and there's simply too much code there (assuming you're even allowed to look at the source!) to comprehend it. I don't like it, but I think it's an unavoidable consequence of computing's evolution into ubiquity.
    - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      That's because at some point the industry lost the plot. The fundamentals are fundamental. They don't change very fast. Applications change all the time. So do frameworks. But there's very little genuinely new in most frameworks, or in most languages for that matter. They're mostly repackagings of the same few ideas. Which is why it's a lot easier to pick up applications and do a good job with them if you know the fundamentals than if you're hacking away without any contextual or historical understanding. Meanwhile someone is going to have to do the next generation of pure research, and it's a lot harder to do something creative and interesting in CS if all you've ever known is js, Python, and Ruby. The reality is that software quality is decreasing. Never mind maintainability or even documentation - applications are becoming increasingly buggy and unreliable. It's common in the UK now for bank systems to crash. Ten years ago it was incredibly rare, and twenty years ago it was practically unthinkable. Software is too important to be left to improvisation and busking. So "just learn to make applications from other applications" is not a welcome move.
      - jdjb 10y ago
        I wonder how much of this is due to the idea: 1) non-technical users need to be able to use our software. How much code today is about preventing users from doing something they should know better? 2) we're less and less able to say "no, that goes way beyond the project's scope" to our bosses. Our bosses will quickly reply "yeah well Google's ______ does it, so why can't we?".
darpa_escapee 10y ago
Your assumption about who writes libraries and who uses whose code is broken.
- hasenj 10y ago
  I think he meant to say "should".
  - darpa_escapee 10y ago
    The point still stands if you add a couple of shoulds to my response as well.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hga 10y ago
Calling it his "reasoning" with all the connotations that come with that word goes way too far. This was his polite implicit criticism of the new core, which among other things also teaches much less in the way of EE fundamentals, a topic he's cared about very much since at least the late '70s (i.e. 6.002 is no longer a required course for all EECS majors). The bottom line is that in the post-dot.com crash panic which saw MIT EECS enrollment drop by more than half, after it had been steady at 40% of the undergraduates for decades, one result was "MIT" deciding that what a MIT EECS degree meant would be substantially different.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  I took 6.002x when MITx was first launched. I don't know how similar it is to 6.002, but if it's still available, I highly recommend it.
- bps4484 10y ago
  It may have been that it just took 7 years to actually get a new course in place, but it wasn't until fall 2007 that MIT officially got rid of 6.001 as required course, well after the dot com crash. There were a TON of changes that happened with the MIT EECS curriculum at that time, so perhaps it was a holistic response to the dot com crash that was beyond just 6.001.
  - hga 10y ago
    I think "panicked spasm" is more accurate than "holistic response", at least in connotation, but as I recall the only real changes were in what was required, terminating the use of Scheme in the entire required curriculum with extreme prejudice, and adding, what, 6.005? Where they claimed to teach most of what was in 6.001/SICP, but using Java, a language which is "not even wrong" for that purpose. Yeah, MIT has become a Javaschool, plus Python.... And just when the failure of Dennard scaling was making functional programming a lot more important.
    - jnbiche 10y ago
      > And just when the failure of Dennard scaling was making functional programming a lot more important. Yep, there's the real irony. Having functional programming skills and experience is a real asset in today's job market, I've found.
gshulegaard 10y ago
In the context of the class (The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs), I feel like this is not such an outlandish view. It sounds to me like the field of software engineering has simply evolved since the 80s. Don't get me wrong, if you are going for post-graduate studies such a course will always be relevant, but it sounds like he is talking within the context of undergraduates. And in the context of undergraduates, I too would be circumspect of how useful it would be for preparing you for your first job as a Software Engineer. Their choice to go toward a Python-based course at the undergraduate level would also seem to reaffirm this view from afar...
- sedachv 10y ago
  > It sounds to me like the field of software engineering has simply evolved since the 80s. What is ridiculous in the face of this "programming by experimentation" fantasy is that programming has evolved since the 1980s... to be even more about composable abstractions with provable semantics. Hindley-Milner-Damas types and monads are now everywhere.
  - fmstephe 10y ago
    Can you expand on the last sentence. I'm not sure I understand what you were trying to express. (not trolling, genuinely curious)
    - sedachv 10y ago
      The application of mathematical type theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_F) to popular programming languages goes back to 1998 when Philip Wadler designed generics for Java. Local type inference is now used in Visual Basic, Scala, Rust, probably a lot of other new languages I am missing. Gradual types are coming to Clojure and probably Python and Lua. Erik Meijer did a lot of work on bringing monads and FRP as patterns to .NET programmers. Java 8 has monads (Optional and Stream interfaces). Bartosz Milewski has been getting a lot of attention in C++ circles (see his blog: https://bartoszmilewski.com/ https://bartoszmilewski.com/)
abc_lisper 10y ago
A few years when MIT switched from SICP/Scheme to Python, Sussman had this to say: "I asked him whether he thought that the shift in the nature of a typical programmer’s world minimizes the relevancy of the themes and principles embodied in scheme. His response was an emphatic ‘no’; in the general case, those core ideas and principles that scheme and SICP have helped to spread for so many years are just as important as they ever were" From: https://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program/ https://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-inst... If anything, I would think Sussman is more practical, and understands what the world needs/expects(now). Literally any programmer who hasn't read SICP before will benefit from it. I think the principles still apply.
rhinoceraptor 10y ago
>libraries that ordinary programmers are stitching together I watched the SICP videos, and I remember Abelson specifically endorsing just that.
afarrell 10y ago
MIT grad here: Nope. I've never had a workday that didn't involve reading through the docs or source of a library I didn't write. I am genuinely grateful to have taken 6.01, the course that replaced 6.001. I am also grateful to have taken the condensed version of 6.001. You do need the ability to understand those abstractions in order to be an informed shopper though.
eli_gottlieb 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? "MIT" doesn't necessarily mean "super-elite programmer". I work in an office that's half MIT grads, and the non-MIT half are pretty much equivalently good (though with much worse connections around Cambridge). That's not to say MIT sucks or anything, but more to say that with luck, a really solid CS or EECS degree gets the student up to being able to build important components from scratch at all, which isn't necessarily the level needed to build those components from scratch for public release or for profit. That latter goal requires a good education followed by professional training and experience.

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.
- Scramblejams 10y ago
  I'm not sure that it's because no one understands the fundamentals any more. (Which, BTW, the latter part I agree with.) I think it's because everything's gotten too large. You need to use too many frameworks and too many libraries just to get anything done today, and there's simply too much code there (assuming you're even allowed to look at the source!) to comprehend it. I don't like it, but I think it's an unavoidable consequence of computing's evolution into ubiquity.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    That's because at some point the industry lost the plot. The fundamentals are fundamental. They don't change very fast. Applications change all the time. So do frameworks. But there's very little genuinely new in most frameworks, or in most languages for that matter. They're mostly repackagings of the same few ideas. Which is why it's a lot easier to pick up applications and do a good job with them if you know the fundamentals than if you're hacking away without any contextual or historical understanding. Meanwhile someone is going to have to do the next generation of pure research, and it's a lot harder to do something creative and interesting in CS if all you've ever known is js, Python, and Ruby. The reality is that software quality is decreasing. Never mind maintainability or even documentation - applications are becoming increasingly buggy and unreliable. It's common in the UK now for bank systems to crash. Ten years ago it was incredibly rare, and twenty years ago it was practically unthinkable. Software is too important to be left to improvisation and busking. So "just learn to make applications from other applications" is not a welcome move.
    - jdjb 10y ago
      I wonder how much of this is due to the idea: 1) non-technical users need to be able to use our software. How much code today is about preventing users from doing something they should know better? 2) we're less and less able to say "no, that goes way beyond the project's scope" to our bosses. Our bosses will quickly reply "yeah well Google's ______ does it, so why can't we?".

darpa_escapee 10y ago

Your assumption about who writes libraries and who uses whose code is broken.

hasenj 10y ago
I think he meant to say "should".
- darpa_escapee 10y ago
  The point still stands if you add a couple of shoulds to my response as well.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hga 10y ago

Calling it his "reasoning" with all the connotations that come with that word goes way too far. This was his polite implicit criticism of the new core, which among other things also teaches much less in the way of EE fundamentals, a topic he's cared about very much since at least the late '70s (i.e. 6.002 is no longer a required course for all EECS majors). The bottom line is that in the post-dot.com crash panic which saw MIT EECS enrollment drop by more than half, after it had been steady at 40% of the undergraduates for decades, one result was "MIT" deciding that what a MIT EECS degree meant would be substantially different.

nitrogen 10y ago
I took 6.002x when MITx was first launched. I don't know how similar it is to 6.002, but if it's still available, I highly recommend it.
bps4484 10y ago
It may have been that it just took 7 years to actually get a new course in place, but it wasn't until fall 2007 that MIT officially got rid of 6.001 as required course, well after the dot com crash. There were a TON of changes that happened with the MIT EECS curriculum at that time, so perhaps it was a holistic response to the dot com crash that was beyond just 6.001.
- hga 10y ago
  I think "panicked spasm" is more accurate than "holistic response", at least in connotation, but as I recall the only real changes were in what was required, terminating the use of Scheme in the entire required curriculum with extreme prejudice, and adding, what, 6.005? Where they claimed to teach most of what was in 6.001/SICP, but using Java, a language which is "not even wrong" for that purpose. Yeah, MIT has become a Javaschool, plus Python.... And just when the failure of Dennard scaling was making functional programming a lot more important.
  - jnbiche 10y ago
    > And just when the failure of Dennard scaling was making functional programming a lot more important. Yep, there's the real irony. Having functional programming skills and experience is a real asset in today's job market, I've found.

gshulegaard 10y ago

In the context of the class (The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs), I feel like this is not such an outlandish view. It sounds to me like the field of software engineering has simply evolved since the 80s. Don't get me wrong, if you are going for post-graduate studies such a course will always be relevant, but it sounds like he is talking within the context of undergraduates. And in the context of undergraduates, I too would be circumspect of how useful it would be for preparing you for your first job as a Software Engineer. Their choice to go toward a Python-based course at the undergraduate level would also seem to reaffirm this view from afar...

sedachv 10y ago
> It sounds to me like the field of software engineering has simply evolved since the 80s. What is ridiculous in the face of this "programming by experimentation" fantasy is that programming has evolved since the 1980s... to be even more about composable abstractions with provable semantics. Hindley-Milner-Damas types and monads are now everywhere.
- fmstephe 10y ago
  Can you expand on the last sentence. I'm not sure I understand what you were trying to express. (not trolling, genuinely curious)
  - sedachv 10y ago
    The application of mathematical type theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_F) to popular programming languages goes back to 1998 when Philip Wadler designed generics for Java. Local type inference is now used in Visual Basic, Scala, Rust, probably a lot of other new languages I am missing. Gradual types are coming to Clojure and probably Python and Lua. Erik Meijer did a lot of work on bringing monads and FRP as patterns to .NET programmers. Java 8 has monads (Optional and Stream interfaces). Bartosz Milewski has been getting a lot of attention in C++ circles (see his blog: https://bartoszmilewski.com/ https://bartoszmilewski.com/)

abc_lisper 10y ago

A few years when MIT switched from SICP/Scheme to Python, Sussman had this to say: "I asked him whether he thought that the shift in the nature of a typical programmer’s world minimizes the relevancy of the themes and principles embodied in scheme. His response was an emphatic ‘no’; in the general case, those core ideas and principles that scheme and SICP have helped to spread for so many years are just as important as they ever were" From: https://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program/ https://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-inst... If anything, I would think Sussman is more practical, and understands what the world needs/expects(now). Literally any programmer who hasn't read SICP before will benefit from it. I think the principles still apply.

rhinoceraptor 10y ago

>libraries that ordinary programmers are stitching together I watched the SICP videos, and I remember Abelson specifically endorsing just that.

afarrell 10y ago

MIT grad here: Nope. I've never had a workday that didn't involve reading through the docs or source of a library I didn't write. I am genuinely grateful to have taken 6.01, the course that replaced 6.001. I am also grateful to have taken the condensed version of 6.001. You do need the ability to understand those abstractions in order to be an informed shopper though.

eli_gottlieb 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? "MIT" doesn't necessarily mean "super-elite programmer". I work in an office that's half MIT grads, and the non-MIT half are pretty much equivalently good (though with much worse connections around Cambridge). That's not to say MIT sucks or anything, but more to say that with luck, a really solid CS or EECS degree gets the student up to being able to build important components from scratch at all, which isn't necessarily the level needed to build those components from scratch for public release or for profit. That latter goal requires a good education followed by professional training and experience.