4 ms·

SICP is a great and mind-expanding book; but I came to it fairly late, at a time when (I think, I hope) I was already decent at "elegant" programming, so it's h

by wk_end 3y ago

SICP is a great and mind-expanding book; but I came to it fairly late, at a time when (I think, I hope) I was already decent at "elegant" programming, so it's hard for me to say if it'd help you program elegantly. Probably, but I don't think that's one of its chief concerns. On the other hand - HtDP is explicitly focused on teaching you patterns of thought that will help you create well-structured programs. It's also significantly easier, so I'd recommend it for your purposes full-throatedly.

mario-main 3y ago
Would you recommend HtDP to a non-beginner? Like SICP, it seems to cover fairly basic concepts and aimed at first-year CS students. I always feel like I'm missing out on some sort of magical programming secrets that will expand my mind like a spiritual retreat when I'm in these threads. But it's just CS 101 except you use Lisp? I don't get it.
- wk_end 3y ago
  HtDP isn't really mind-blowing the same way SICP can be. It basically just tries to give you a mental framework and tools for breaking problems down into simple, composable, testable pieces - in terms of the work you're doing it's CS 101, but it's a particularly good implementation of CS 101. There's "senior" engineers at my company that I think would benefit from reading and absorbing HtDP. But, if I'm being honest, yes, an experienced developer would likely find it tedious. SICP's big mind-expanding thing is that it teaches CS 101 through the process of building, from within a computational system, an entirely new computational system - various kinds of programming languages and later even a machine and compiler. In this sense it kind of peels away a lot of the magic of how computers and programming languages work. For lots of CS students - and even professionals - who've never really thought about what makes their Python interpreter tick, that's a big discovery. It's also a real pedagogical feat.

by wk_end 3y ago

mario-main 3y ago

Would you recommend HtDP to a non-beginner? Like SICP, it seems to cover fairly basic concepts and aimed at first-year CS students. I always feel like I'm missing out on some sort of magical programming secrets that will expand my mind like a spiritual retreat when I'm in these threads. But it's just CS 101 except you use Lisp? I don't get it.

wk_end 3y ago
HtDP isn't really mind-blowing the same way SICP can be. It basically just tries to give you a mental framework and tools for breaking problems down into simple, composable, testable pieces - in terms of the work you're doing it's CS 101, but it's a particularly good implementation of CS 101. There's "senior" engineers at my company that I think would benefit from reading and absorbing HtDP. But, if I'm being honest, yes, an experienced developer would likely find it tedious. SICP's big mind-expanding thing is that it teaches CS 101 through the process of building, from within a computational system, an entirely new computational system - various kinds of programming languages and later even a machine and compiler. In this sense it kind of peels away a lot of the magic of how computers and programming languages work. For lots of CS students - and even professionals - who've never really thought about what makes their Python interpreter tick, that's a big discovery. It's also a real pedagogical feat.