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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Program (it's written in scheme but it's mostly for convenience and its lack of syntax). Definitely the best book I've

by d0m 9y ago

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Program (it's written in scheme but it's mostly for convenience and its lack of syntax). Definitely the best book I've read on programming.

chii 9y ago
I'd find it quite hard to apply lessons from SCIP using java or c...
- yomly 9y ago
  What were your main takeaways from SICP? While it certainly espouses a functional style, I found the greatest lesssons to be higher level, focusing on abstraction. Though I have limited knowledge of C and Java so would be keen to hear your elaborated thoughts on this.
  - chii 9y ago
    when you start to get to the parts about abstracting a circut, and making it streamy/lazy, you'd find that the impl details of a non-lazy language can make it more difficult than it needs to be. Also, as a beginner, you don't want both the difficulties of contepts _and_ the difficulties of language to combine to stop you from learning as effectively.
    - yomly 9y ago
      But Scheme isn't a lazy language - granted, you'll need a language that supports first class functions to lift their implementation of a stream though. >Also, as a beginner, you don't want both the difficulties of contepts _and_ the difficulties of language to combine to stop you from learning as effectively. Are you referring to the need to learn Scheme to work through SICP? While the asker specifically requested language-agnostic books, Scheme was chosen as a language for SICP for being a "syntax-free" language...
      - chii 9y ago
        > Are you referring to the need to learn Scheme to work through SICP? no, i'm referring to the fact that this book isn't language agnostic (i.e., you wouldn't want to use anything other than scheme/lisp).
      - pvg 9y ago
        Scheme was chosen as a language for SICP for being a "syntax-free" language... First-class functions, lambdas, closures, lexical scoping, etc. Abelson wrote, for instance: "6.001 differs from typical introductory computer science subjects in using Scheme (a block-structured dialect of Lisp) rather than Pascal as its programming vehicle. The subject's developers feel strongly that Pascal is hopelessly constraining, and that important ideas (such as functional programming and object-oriented programming) can be addressed within Pascal only awkwardly, if at all."
      - gumby 9y ago
        > Are you referring to the need to learn Scheme to work through SICP? That's not particularly demanding requirement. The class began with a single lecture about how Scheme worked and after that Hal and Gerry assumed you knew all the language you needed to and dove in. When the course was introduced (early 80s), most incoming MIT freshman had not programmed a computer (!), including those who planned to do course 6 (EE or CS -- 6.001 was a requirement for either degree).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- fsloth 9y ago
  "I'd find it quite hard to apply lessons from SCIP using java or c" IMO, you're supposed to write your own Scheme to reap full benefits from SICP. The book contains a recipe for an interpreter that can be transferred to any other language. Chapter 5.4 : The explicit-control evaluator[0]. Strangely this fact is not advertised that much, I find it to be one of the coollest features of the book. The implementation is not a direct syntax translation - one needs to figure out how to implement the base susbstrate and how to handle e.g. tokenization, but well rounded software engineer should have some model in ones head how to manage these (so if there are missing pieces this is a good opportunity to brush on those). [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-34.html#%_sec_5.4 https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-34.htm...
- jerf 9y ago
  These are indications of the weakness of Java and C, not SICP. I do not mean this as empty snark; it is something you can see across the board in programming language evolution. It is virtually impossible to propose a new general-purpose programming language today that does not have closure support, which is the biggest thing you're finding missing from C and Java to use the techniques in SICP. (It is not the only thing, but it is the biggest thing.) You'll note Java is going to bolt them on soon, or recently bolted them on, but it'll be another decade before Java is using them fluently either way. I've often recommend SICP to self-taught programmers; it is not a complete substitute for a computer science education, but it is a concentrated dose of the stuff you're probably missing out on. Expect it to be the work of some months to work through it. However, in the end, a self-taught programmer who has also worked through SICP systematically and carefully is probably a better programmer than 80% of the modern computer science graduates nowadays. (If you want to avoid that fate, oh ye who are still in school, take the freaking compilers course at the very least. Do your peers complain that it is hard? Then maybe it is a good one.)
  - pvg 9y ago
    They're indications the book is also not 'language-agnostic', for all of its merits. The language is there for pedagogic purpose.
    - jerf 9y ago
      I don't think a book is "not language agnostic" because two particular languages aren't very good at it. C's lack of closure support is unique among any language still in use, for a variety of reasons. Java... was Java. If you weren't there you may not remember or understand, but at the time OO was at its most dogmatic and either it was an object or it was not included. Anything you could do with a closure could be done with an anonymous inner class. (Which is, technically, true. But the amplification factor on the effort and the sheer quantity of text involved to do so in Java is astonishing.) You can hear some of the echos of this in the older Ruby rhetoric, though I haven't heard it in a while. Any other general-purpose language you'd be inclined to pick up right now would be fine. IIRC, you end up implementing a scheme, which you can do nearly in the language of your choice, then the book covers that language you are implementing.
- codehd7 9y ago
  It's been "redone" for Python: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/book/ http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/book/
- Pitarou 9y ago
  After SICP and a little study of functional programming, I started learning about design patterns, and my immediate reaction was, “What’s all the fuss about? I mean ... c’mon ... how else would you solve that problem?” It took me a while to understand that, if you’ve been raised on Java or C, these things are not obvious at all.
evbots 9y ago
Second this. I'm making my way through the book now. I'm impressed by how well it articulates concepts from the ground-up.
zerr 9y ago
And original MIT video lectures (for HP employees) are must watch. The mood/feel they have, impossible to receive from the book alone.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > And original MIT video lectures (for HP employees) are must watch. The mood/feel they have, impossible to receive from the book alone. Link?
  - ucsdrake 9y ago
    I assume it's: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- gm-conspiracy 9y ago
  Link, please?
  - tarp 9y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090
- antfarm 9y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLE18841CABEA24090 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLE18841CAB...
suyash 9y ago
Plus 1
eru 9y ago
I re-read SICP recently, because I was teaching a friend. I had very rose-tinted nostalgic memories. They did not hold up. "How to Design Programmes" is a much better book. (But made for rank beginners.) And for the more advanced, "Types and Programming Languages". See "Why Calculating is better than Scheming" (https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.pdf https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87....) for a critique. Don't get me wrong, SICP is still a good book to have read. Just no longer my favourite.

by d0m 9y ago

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Program (it's written in scheme but it's mostly for convenience and its lack of syntax). Definitely the best book I've read on programming.

chii 9y ago

I'd find it quite hard to apply lessons from SCIP using java or c...

yomly 9y ago
What were your main takeaways from SICP? While it certainly espouses a functional style, I found the greatest lesssons to be higher level, focusing on abstraction. Though I have limited knowledge of C and Java so would be keen to hear your elaborated thoughts on this.
- chii 9y ago
  when you start to get to the parts about abstracting a circut, and making it streamy/lazy, you'd find that the impl details of a non-lazy language can make it more difficult than it needs to be. Also, as a beginner, you don't want both the difficulties of contepts _and_ the difficulties of language to combine to stop you from learning as effectively.
  - yomly 9y ago
    But Scheme isn't a lazy language - granted, you'll need a language that supports first class functions to lift their implementation of a stream though. >Also, as a beginner, you don't want both the difficulties of contepts _and_ the difficulties of language to combine to stop you from learning as effectively. Are you referring to the need to learn Scheme to work through SICP? While the asker specifically requested language-agnostic books, Scheme was chosen as a language for SICP for being a "syntax-free" language...
    - chii 9y ago
      > Are you referring to the need to learn Scheme to work through SICP? no, i'm referring to the fact that this book isn't language agnostic (i.e., you wouldn't want to use anything other than scheme/lisp).
    - pvg 9y ago
      Scheme was chosen as a language for SICP for being a "syntax-free" language... First-class functions, lambdas, closures, lexical scoping, etc. Abelson wrote, for instance: "6.001 differs from typical introductory computer science subjects in using Scheme (a block-structured dialect of Lisp) rather than Pascal as its programming vehicle. The subject's developers feel strongly that Pascal is hopelessly constraining, and that important ideas (such as functional programming and object-oriented programming) can be addressed within Pascal only awkwardly, if at all."
    - gumby 9y ago
      > Are you referring to the need to learn Scheme to work through SICP? That's not particularly demanding requirement. The class began with a single lecture about how Scheme worked and after that Hal and Gerry assumed you knew all the language you needed to and dove in. When the course was introduced (early 80s), most incoming MIT freshman had not programmed a computer (!), including those who planned to do course 6 (EE or CS -- 6.001 was a requirement for either degree).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fsloth 9y ago
"I'd find it quite hard to apply lessons from SCIP using java or c" IMO, you're supposed to write your own Scheme to reap full benefits from SICP. The book contains a recipe for an interpreter that can be transferred to any other language. Chapter 5.4 : The explicit-control evaluator[0]. Strangely this fact is not advertised that much, I find it to be one of the coollest features of the book. The implementation is not a direct syntax translation - one needs to figure out how to implement the base susbstrate and how to handle e.g. tokenization, but well rounded software engineer should have some model in ones head how to manage these (so if there are missing pieces this is a good opportunity to brush on those). [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-34.html#%_sec_5.4 https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-34.htm...
jerf 9y ago
These are indications of the weakness of Java and C, not SICP. I do not mean this as empty snark; it is something you can see across the board in programming language evolution. It is virtually impossible to propose a new general-purpose programming language today that does not have closure support, which is the biggest thing you're finding missing from C and Java to use the techniques in SICP. (It is not the only thing, but it is the biggest thing.) You'll note Java is going to bolt them on soon, or recently bolted them on, but it'll be another decade before Java is using them fluently either way. I've often recommend SICP to self-taught programmers; it is not a complete substitute for a computer science education, but it is a concentrated dose of the stuff you're probably missing out on. Expect it to be the work of some months to work through it. However, in the end, a self-taught programmer who has also worked through SICP systematically and carefully is probably a better programmer than 80% of the modern computer science graduates nowadays. (If you want to avoid that fate, oh ye who are still in school, take the freaking compilers course at the very least. Do your peers complain that it is hard? Then maybe it is a good one.)
- pvg 9y ago
  They're indications the book is also not 'language-agnostic', for all of its merits. The language is there for pedagogic purpose.
  - jerf 9y ago
    I don't think a book is "not language agnostic" because two particular languages aren't very good at it. C's lack of closure support is unique among any language still in use, for a variety of reasons. Java... was Java. If you weren't there you may not remember or understand, but at the time OO was at its most dogmatic and either it was an object or it was not included. Anything you could do with a closure could be done with an anonymous inner class. (Which is, technically, true. But the amplification factor on the effort and the sheer quantity of text involved to do so in Java is astonishing.) You can hear some of the echos of this in the older Ruby rhetoric, though I haven't heard it in a while. Any other general-purpose language you'd be inclined to pick up right now would be fine. IIRC, you end up implementing a scheme, which you can do nearly in the language of your choice, then the book covers that language you are implementing.
codehd7 9y ago
It's been "redone" for Python: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/book/ http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/book/
Pitarou 9y ago
After SICP and a little study of functional programming, I started learning about design patterns, and my immediate reaction was, “What’s all the fuss about? I mean ... c’mon ... how else would you solve that problem?” It took me a while to understand that, if you’ve been raised on Java or C, these things are not obvious at all.

evbots 9y ago

Second this. I'm making my way through the book now. I'm impressed by how well it articulates concepts from the ground-up.

zerr 9y ago

And original MIT video lectures (for HP employees) are must watch. The mood/feel they have, impossible to receive from the book alone.

Chaebixi 9y ago
> And original MIT video lectures (for HP employees) are must watch. The mood/feel they have, impossible to receive from the book alone. Link?
- ucsdrake 9y ago
  I assume it's: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
gm-conspiracy 9y ago
Link, please?
- tarp 9y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090
antfarm 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLE18841CABEA24090 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLE18841CAB...

suyash 9y ago

Plus 1

eru 9y ago

I re-read SICP recently, because I was teaching a friend. I had very rose-tinted nostalgic memories. They did not hold up. "How to Design Programmes" is a much better book. (But made for rank beginners.) And for the more advanced, "Types and Programming Languages". See "Why Calculating is better than Scheming" (https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.pdf https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87....) for a critique. Don't get me wrong, SICP is still a good book to have read. Just no longer my favourite.