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That kind of annoyed me when I delved into a it a while ago, too. I have decent mathematical sophistication (I do a lot of linear algebra and computational geom

That kind of annoyed me when I delved into a it a while ago, too. I have decent mathematical sophistication (I do a lot of linear algebra and computational geometry for work, read graphics papers and math history), though I'm largely self-taught, and had bad gaps in very basic things at the time I was attempting to read SICP. So when I came across all the math-related stuff in it, I'd have to stop reading and go learn about some things that were basically orthogonal to the subject matter I was actually interested in from the book (e.g. principles for effectively managing complexity with functional constructs). It's one thing to say CS and math have similar intrinsic structure—but that doesn't mean the content of the two fields need to overlap, and we shouldn't assume the content of one in the other. Imagine if you were reading a book on real analysis but they kept bringing in examples that required you to know CS stuff.

dan-robertson 8y ago
I basically agree. SICP makes a lot more sense when considered in the context of a course at MIT, taken after a first course in calculus. The exercises are easy to motivate if one can motivate the study of calculus (e.g. calculus is useful because X, therefore doing calculus by computer is useful because X but faster). The examples therefore feel relevant to what one knows and what one knows is useful (or at least considered useful by lecturers). I think it is hard to find good exercises for this sort of early computer science outside of mathematics sadly. It seems to me that there is less variety in the computational constructs one might use in solving problems about producing or processing text (which are concisely written and have a small solution), but I think the book does emphasise mathematical examples more than needed. For example there are other first examples of higher order functions than Newton Raphson, and proving things on the way to a logarithmic Fibonacci algorithm is largely irrelevant to the kind of computer science that people looking at Teach yourself Computer Science are interested in.

dan-robertson 8y ago

I basically agree. SICP makes a lot more sense when considered in the context of a course at MIT, taken after a first course in calculus. The exercises are easy to motivate if one can motivate the study of calculus (e.g. calculus is useful because X, therefore doing calculus by computer is useful because X but faster). The examples therefore feel relevant to what one knows and what one knows is useful (or at least considered useful by lecturers). I think it is hard to find good exercises for this sort of early computer science outside of mathematics sadly. It seems to me that there is less variety in the computational constructs one might use in solving problems about producing or processing text (which are concisely written and have a small solution), but I think the book does emphasise mathematical examples more than needed. For example there are other first examples of higher order functions than Newton Raphson, and proving things on the way to a logarithmic Fibonacci algorithm is largely irrelevant to the kind of computer science that people looking at Teach yourself Computer Science are interested in.