3 ms·
Agreed. 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
by randcraw 8y ago
Agreed. 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.