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As an industry we are capable of producing software that is completely incomprehensible to anyone, yes. That is not the argument. You haven't demonstrated that

As an industry we are capable of producing software that is completely incomprehensible to anyone, yes. That is not the argument. You haven't demonstrated that this is a good idea, or that there isn't a better way this software could have been created. The division of labor does not have to be an infinite regress, in fact it cannot, which was obvious to Smith. How many different trades should replace the one that SICP or other fundamentals-first approaches can prepare you for?

kilgnad 4y ago
You wouldn't be able to reply to me if it wasn't a good idea. The amount of software just to transmit your words to me and others is already too complex for anyone to completely understand. It's not just software most of the technology you use in your life is already are too complex for you to understand. Modern civilization is built on abstraction. If you think there's a better way, then you'd be arguing against modern civilization which is a different conversation all together. The thing that replaced sicp is not multiple trades and skills. There is one skill that functions as replacement. Rather then constructing programs from primitive axioms you employ another skill. Science and investigation. You poke and experiment with a library until you bend it to do what you want. It's a hard course to teach or even design though. How do you teach science/investigation vs. the principles of first order logic? The later is straightforward the former is not. Still, even though it's more elegant and straightforward the later subject is much much less relevant to what a modern software engineer does on the job.
- inimino 4y ago
  I think before making any broad statements here I'd want us to be clear about what it means to completely understand something. I was once asked the classic interview question about what happens when you type a domain and hit enter in a browser, and my answer (which I attempted to tailor to every level of understanding in the room) was good enough that the co-founders met me at street level and I had an offer before I could get 20 steps away from the building. Could I tell you what's going on on a line of code picked at random from the browser I'm using, or any random library it depends on? Much less likely. But do I understand, for example, why and how the DNS works? Yes. Arguing against (parts of) modern civilization is the only thing that might improve it. SICP is about abstraction, that's where the book starts. Science and investigation is hard to teach, indeed, but if you start with a platform that is inscrutable and unreliable, you're not going to be doing as much science. Look, I'm not saying poking at libraries, or programming by way of SO, NPM, and ChatGPT is bad. I'm just saying that if you think that's the scientific way, and the way advocated by SICP is less scientific, then I think you should re-check the steps of your reasoning, because I'm pretty sure that's not true.
  - kilgnad 4y ago
    >SICP is about abstraction, that's where the book starts. abstraction is a simple concept. Everyone understands it. SICP goes deeper then that but it doesn't explicitly say it. What sicp is about is abstraction from the ground up. Every entity in your program is essentially modular and re-usable unit. This is opposed to procedural programming where a list of procedures isn't modular due to mutating state. Though even in the traditional style of programming, abstraction can still be done. You can encapsulate both the procedures and mutating state into modules. This concept is well understood. >Science and investigation is hard to teach, indeed, but if you start with a platform that is inscrutable and unreliable, you're not going to be doing as much science. Unreliable? They used python. Python is pretty reliable. More so then C++. Python is definitely inscrutable but not much more inscrutable then scheme. What you can do in scheme you can do in python. What you can do in python, you can't necessarily do in scheme. It's the restrictiveness of FP languages where the modular composition pattern starts to arise. >Look, I'm not saying poking at libraries, or programming by way of SO, NPM, and ChatGPT is bad. I'm just saying that if you think that's the scientific way, and the way advocated by SICP is less scientific, then I think you should re-check the steps of your reasoning, because I'm pretty sure that's not true. The way advocated by SICP is not scientific. It's more logical and mathematical in it's approach. You start off with primitives (axioms) and you build theorems from the primitives. Modern programming is the other way around. Top down. You have a complex library with shitty arcane documentation then you have to constantly try things out with it and poke at it to get it to work properly. This is indeed science. You make a hypothesis and you test, the result of the test falsifies or confirms your hypothesis. It is extremely hard to formulate a efficient hypothesis and sometimes hard to come up with a way to easily test it. On the other hand FP style programming while beautiful is significantly easier then trying to decode a blackbox.
    - inimino 4y ago
      SICP starts with abstraction, and gets there via closures, which are an abstraction that encompasses and goes beyond everything that OOP can do with regards to encapsulation. You can do as much mutation as you want in Scheme, SICP uses this to explore some ideas. It does take a primarily SSA or non-mutating approach, but it's a far cry from hairshirt-wearing pure FP. I mean, the book has you simulate a register machine. It's not afraid of mutation. Python is fine, and if they used the Scheme-like subset of Python, it'd be a similar book. But they picked it (the committees that Sussman mockingly describes as doing the things committees do) because of the libraries. So the idea is that you'll be doing "science" on libraries, which replaces (in the 90s) having students reading man pages (look how out-of-touch Sussman already sounds here! nobody reads man-pages anymore, now SO is preferred, it being better to get a solution than to consult a reference). Sussman is not praising the experimental approach, where you need to probe your libraries like a science experiment before you can use them, where now you need to do science before you can do science, he is mocking it. People using shitty libraries with shitty documentation, and building systems on top of these foundations, are doing science that didn't need to be done, solving problems that didn't exist before those choices were made. It's frustrating work that gets in the way of real work, that is, work that engages with the complexity inherent in the domain. It's an inefficiency that is self-imposed, not so much by the individual programmer, but certainly by the industry as a whole deciding to go in this direction.

kilgnad 4y ago

You wouldn't be able to reply to me if it wasn't a good idea. The amount of software just to transmit your words to me and others is already too complex for anyone to completely understand. It's not just software most of the technology you use in your life is already are too complex for you to understand. Modern civilization is built on abstraction. If you think there's a better way, then you'd be arguing against modern civilization which is a different conversation all together. The thing that replaced sicp is not multiple trades and skills. There is one skill that functions as replacement. Rather then constructing programs from primitive axioms you employ another skill. Science and investigation. You poke and experiment with a library until you bend it to do what you want. It's a hard course to teach or even design though. How do you teach science/investigation vs. the principles of first order logic? The later is straightforward the former is not. Still, even though it's more elegant and straightforward the later subject is much much less relevant to what a modern software engineer does on the job.

inimino 4y ago
I think before making any broad statements here I'd want us to be clear about what it means to completely understand something. I was once asked the classic interview question about what happens when you type a domain and hit enter in a browser, and my answer (which I attempted to tailor to every level of understanding in the room) was good enough that the co-founders met me at street level and I had an offer before I could get 20 steps away from the building. Could I tell you what's going on on a line of code picked at random from the browser I'm using, or any random library it depends on? Much less likely. But do I understand, for example, why and how the DNS works? Yes. Arguing against (parts of) modern civilization is the only thing that might improve it. SICP is about abstraction, that's where the book starts. Science and investigation is hard to teach, indeed, but if you start with a platform that is inscrutable and unreliable, you're not going to be doing as much science. Look, I'm not saying poking at libraries, or programming by way of SO, NPM, and ChatGPT is bad. I'm just saying that if you think that's the scientific way, and the way advocated by SICP is less scientific, then I think you should re-check the steps of your reasoning, because I'm pretty sure that's not true.
- kilgnad 4y ago
  >SICP is about abstraction, that's where the book starts. abstraction is a simple concept. Everyone understands it. SICP goes deeper then that but it doesn't explicitly say it. What sicp is about is abstraction from the ground up. Every entity in your program is essentially modular and re-usable unit. This is opposed to procedural programming where a list of procedures isn't modular due to mutating state. Though even in the traditional style of programming, abstraction can still be done. You can encapsulate both the procedures and mutating state into modules. This concept is well understood. >Science and investigation is hard to teach, indeed, but if you start with a platform that is inscrutable and unreliable, you're not going to be doing as much science. Unreliable? They used python. Python is pretty reliable. More so then C++. Python is definitely inscrutable but not much more inscrutable then scheme. What you can do in scheme you can do in python. What you can do in python, you can't necessarily do in scheme. It's the restrictiveness of FP languages where the modular composition pattern starts to arise. >Look, I'm not saying poking at libraries, or programming by way of SO, NPM, and ChatGPT is bad. I'm just saying that if you think that's the scientific way, and the way advocated by SICP is less scientific, then I think you should re-check the steps of your reasoning, because I'm pretty sure that's not true. The way advocated by SICP is not scientific. It's more logical and mathematical in it's approach. You start off with primitives (axioms) and you build theorems from the primitives. Modern programming is the other way around. Top down. You have a complex library with shitty arcane documentation then you have to constantly try things out with it and poke at it to get it to work properly. This is indeed science. You make a hypothesis and you test, the result of the test falsifies or confirms your hypothesis. It is extremely hard to formulate a efficient hypothesis and sometimes hard to come up with a way to easily test it. On the other hand FP style programming while beautiful is significantly easier then trying to decode a blackbox.
  - inimino 4y ago
    SICP starts with abstraction, and gets there via closures, which are an abstraction that encompasses and goes beyond everything that OOP can do with regards to encapsulation. You can do as much mutation as you want in Scheme, SICP uses this to explore some ideas. It does take a primarily SSA or non-mutating approach, but it's a far cry from hairshirt-wearing pure FP. I mean, the book has you simulate a register machine. It's not afraid of mutation. Python is fine, and if they used the Scheme-like subset of Python, it'd be a similar book. But they picked it (the committees that Sussman mockingly describes as doing the things committees do) because of the libraries. So the idea is that you'll be doing "science" on libraries, which replaces (in the 90s) having students reading man pages (look how out-of-touch Sussman already sounds here! nobody reads man-pages anymore, now SO is preferred, it being better to get a solution than to consult a reference). Sussman is not praising the experimental approach, where you need to probe your libraries like a science experiment before you can use them, where now you need to do science before you can do science, he is mocking it. People using shitty libraries with shitty documentation, and building systems on top of these foundations, are doing science that didn't need to be done, solving problems that didn't exist before those choices were made. It's frustrating work that gets in the way of real work, that is, work that engages with the complexity inherent in the domain. It's an inefficiency that is self-imposed, not so much by the individual programmer, but certainly by the industry as a whole deciding to go in this direction.