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SICP is an amazing book that will make you a better programmer, but might not help you with the task of writing better professional Python programs. If you aspi
by amackera 3y ago
SICP is an amazing book that will make you a better programmer, but might not help you with the task of writing better professional Python programs. If you aspire to understand computing systems from first-principles, there's no better resource that SICP. I've read it multiple times and I learn something new each time.
Do the exercises too!
- f1shy 3y ago> but might not help you with the task of writing better professional Python programs Let me disagree here: right now I’m doing mentoring with some python programmers where I work, they watch the videos, read the relevant part of the book, and we have a discussion together after each part. I hear constantly “oh yeah, I can apply that here or there”, “this streams concept is so good”, etc etc etc. I think it is most valuable if your background is “only” Algol family languages.
- cbm-vic-20 3y agoLikewise, TAoCP (er, Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming") is even _older_ than SICP, and will definitely not help with writing better professional Python programs, but is steeped in first-principles goodness. Even so, I end up turning to it every once in a while; once while figuring out some tricky allocation code, and another to see if I could find a way to skip a few steps in a piece of code that needed to run in a tight loop. It's certainly not required reading to be a successful programmer in the 21st century, but like SICP, it offers a different way of looking at things that may help influence some of your decisions on how to build something.
- nine_k 3y agoSomebody said: "I studied Lisp and Haskell to write better Python and Javascript"; I find it extremely applicable to my daily practice.