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The audience that SICP was written for seems to be basically a younger, roughly freshman-year Gerry Sussman, with all the advantages and disadvantages that enta

by leoc 8y ago

The audience that SICP was written for seems to be basically a younger, roughly freshman-year Gerry Sussman, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails. I haven't done HtDP yet. I love The Little Schemer http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/ , but I can't recommend it unequivocally, mainly because I've found (somewhat to my surprise) that it's not accessible to all programming beginners without quite a lot of extra in-person tuition. (And I'm talking about the early chapters here, not chs. 7-10 or chs. 8-10.)

chongli 8y ago
The book is written for freshmen at MIT, not your average high school grad. You're expected to have a solid foundation in calculus to get admitted to MIT. This is what everyone seems to be forgetting.
- tzs 8y ago
  Was that true in the early '80s, when SICP was presumably developed (it was first published in 1985). I know that at Caltech in the early '80s, a majority of incoming students had not had calculus in high school. I would expect MIT to be similar.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hackermailman 8y ago
    6.001 was a second semester course, all incoming students had already completed a semester in undergrad calc and physics. http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-quarterly/2011/hal-abelson/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-quarterly/2011/hal-abelson/ "There’s a tremendous amount (of math) in this 6.001 book. That’s partly because we were writing it for MIT. You want to talk about higher-order procedures, so the obvious thing you can do is you can express the idea of an integral. So that’s an obstacle for lots of places. Remember, at MIT the context we were writing in is every person who took the course had just had a semester of calculus. We actually did some versions for the Humanities faculty, where we didn’t do that at all, and we effectively started with the data structure chapter and then talked about the ideas for how do you structure and manipulate data, and then do abstractions over that." HtDP is similar to their other version, starting with data. Author of that book has a good talk about creating a compsci curriculum https://youtu.be/5c0BvOlR5gs https://youtu.be/5c0BvOlR5gs

by leoc 8y ago

chongli 8y ago

The book is written for freshmen at MIT, not your average high school grad. You're expected to have a solid foundation in calculus to get admitted to MIT. This is what everyone seems to be forgetting.

tzs 8y ago
Was that true in the early '80s, when SICP was presumably developed (it was first published in 1985). I know that at Caltech in the early '80s, a majority of incoming students had not had calculus in high school. I would expect MIT to be similar.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- hackermailman 8y ago
  6.001 was a second semester course, all incoming students had already completed a semester in undergrad calc and physics. http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-quarterly/2011/hal-abelson/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-quarterly/2011/hal-abelson/ "There’s a tremendous amount (of math) in this 6.001 book. That’s partly because we were writing it for MIT. You want to talk about higher-order procedures, so the obvious thing you can do is you can express the idea of an integral. So that’s an obstacle for lots of places. Remember, at MIT the context we were writing in is every person who took the course had just had a semester of calculus. We actually did some versions for the Humanities faculty, where we didn’t do that at all, and we effectively started with the data structure chapter and then talked about the ideas for how do you structure and manipulate data, and then do abstractions over that." HtDP is similar to their other version, starting with data. Author of that book has a good talk about creating a compsci curriculum https://youtu.be/5c0BvOlR5gs https://youtu.be/5c0BvOlR5gs