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It is useful to consider the audience the book was written for: first-year students at MIT in the 1980s. That was a formidably bright and meticulously prepared
by johan_larson 8y ago
It is useful to consider the audience the book was written for: first-year students at MIT in the 1980s. That was a formidably bright and meticulously prepared group. Many of them already had some programming experience from high school.
It's not too surprising that a book tailored to such a crowd's particular needs is not particularly suited to other students, whether less bright, less prepared, or simply true beginners to programming.
- randcraw 8y agoAgreed. Fashion and perspective change with time, and the approach taken in SICP doesn't match up well with the cognitive impedence of 18 year olds today, some 40 years after the book was written. Then, PCs were not yet integrated in university teaching. It was still common for students to sketch out new software in pseudocode on paper before sitting down at a terminal they'd waited hours to get access to. And of course, editors were crude, IDEs nonexistent, and the compile-run-edit cycle often took 15 minutes or longer. Programming was more deliberate, involving absolutely no cutting and pasteing. Coding then was much closer to writing a proof, which goes a long way to explaining why SICP put more emphasis in principles, formality, and derivation than we do today.
- darkpuma 8y ago> "Many of them already had some programming experience from high school." Supposedly those that did found SICP to be more challenging than those who didn't.