5 ms·
I'm curious... when is one "ready" for SICP?
by superuser2 13y ago
I'm curious... when is one "ready" for SICP?
- willismichael 13y agoIdeally before you're exposed to OOP - it will be a lot harder to grok after that.
- Shorel 13y agoBecause classes are the poor man's closures?
- base698 13y agoStructs are the poor man's classes.
- btilly 13y agoNo, because if you're starting with OO as implemented in any particular language then you can never get to insights like http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-18.html#footnote_Temp_289 http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-18.html... which, since I know people won't follow the link, I'll quote from: Developing a useful, general framework for expressing the relations among different types of entities (what philosophers call ``ontology'') seems intractably difficult. The main difference between the confusion that existed ten years ago and the confusion that exists now is that now a variety of inadequate ontological theories have been embodied in a plethora of correspondingly inadequate programming languages. For example, much of the complexity of object-oriented programming languages -- and the subtle and confusing differences among contemporary object-oriented languages -- centers on the treatment of generic operations on interrelated types.
- 3rd3 13y agoI don’t quite get the last bit. Why is "centering on the treatment of generic operations on interrelated types" inadequate? Do they talk about the tree-like structure of inheritance which might be useless in scenarios where the relations can be better modelled by an arbitrary graph? Also, why would studying OO first be narrowing my ability to learn different paradigms?
- route66 13y agoAbout the last bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance_and_contravariance_%28computer_science%29#Need_for_covariant_argument_types.3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance_and_contravariance_%... is probably one of the issues.
- btilly 13y agoIt is, although programmers have mostly working solutions that they are used to for that one.
- btilly 13y agoI don’t quite get the last bit. Why is "centering on the treatment of generic operations on interrelated types" inadequate? Go to the link, and find what it was a footnote on. You'll be reading through a section that is attempting to make operations like addition work in a reasonable way across different numeric types for an abstract math package which needs to support integers, rationals, floating point, complex analogs of all of the above, polynomials over all of the above, and lots of other fun stuff.. Do they talk about the tree-like structure of inheritance which might be useless in scenarios where the relations can be better modelled by an arbitrary graph? Look at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-18.html#%_fig_2.26 http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-18.html... for a set of different geometric types that is challenging to model with inheritance. Also, why would studying OO first be narrowing my ability to learn different paradigm? Because your mind naturally goes through prepared channels. If you've got OO available to you, then you naturally solve the simple versions of problems with OO. Then when you get to the subtleties of the complex version that your form of OO doesn't work well for, it is hard to see that OO isn't a good fit, rather than being trapped into thinking that you just chose a poor initial model.
- wonderzombie 13y ago"When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's object."
- Shorel 13y agoThat's the answer I expected ^_^
- bcoates 13y agoThis is why I support exposing new programmers to Basic: unlearning bad ideas is a core skill we should start developing early.
- ilyanep 13y agoI think Dijkstra just rolled in his grave a bit.
- aswanson 13y agoIm guessing youre being sarcástic, but Basic should not be visited upon any human you wish no harm done to. It was a pox on a generation of programmers, foisted upon us under the guise of 'lets expose kids to computers! Thats a Good Thing!'
- derefr 13y agoThat's a fascinating idea. Reminds me of http://lesswrong.com/lw/us/the_ritual/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/us/the_ritual/
- aswanson 13y agoStarting a programmer off in BASIC is akin to starting an English major off in ebonics.
- arundelo 13y agoNot a very good analogy. [...] a very particular piece of grammar, expressing a nuance that standard English leaves to context. Black English is a seemingly still water that runs deep. http://www.theroot.com/views/why-dea-needs-ebonics-translators http://www.theroot.com/views/why-dea-needs-ebonics-translato...
- aswanson 13y agoI stand corrected, good link. Nonetheless, would still wish Basic never entered my life.
- tzs 13y ago
- ww520 13y agoI found the oppose to be true. The more the different things you exposed to, the more you can borrow to reflect on the new material. Exposed to a different paradigm like OOP only helps.
- shrughes 13y agoUm, no? Having more experience with programming would make things easier to understand.
- WalterSear 13y agoAccording to Paul's writing here, when you are ready to give it a 5 star review on amazon. Now, when will it and The Art of Computer Programming be available in an electronic format?
- rmckayfleming 13y agoSICP is available online (HTML) and I recall finding an epub version someone made of it on GitHub. https://github.com/ieure/sicp https://github.com/ieure/sicp
- pdog 13y agoThe full text has been available online for years. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/sicp.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/sicp.html
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Simucal 13y ago"Now, when will it and The Art of Computer Programming be available in an electronic format?"
- WalterSear 13y agoThanks. When it wasn't available in kindle on amazon, and TAoCP having not made the jump from paper (pdfs don't count. They are a terrible format for books), I assumed that it was likewise unavailable.
- Simucal 13y agoI don't know about TAoCP but SICP has been available in electronic format for some time. They released the full book as HTML [1] but others have taken to formatting it in Mobi [2], PDF [3] and even a "Pocket" edition [4] formatted for small devices. [1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html [2] https://github.com/twcamper/sicp-kindle https://github.com/twcamper/sicp-kindle [3] https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pdf [4] https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pocket https://github.com/sarabander/sicp-pocket
- dchichkov 13y agoThe external metric that one can use is: "did it make my code and my ability to explain things less complicated and more understandable to other people". If yes - that person was ready. If no, if as a result both code and the language of that person got filled with formal and obscure complications... then no. Not ready.
- gbog 13y agoEveryone here seem to think its take it out leave it, eat all of it or nothing. I don't agree. Get the book. Sneak in when you have an hour left without forcing yourself. You might get hooked as I have been. Then you'll find more hours for it. Do or don't do the exercises, it's not important. If there is a couple of paragraphs you don't understand, don't worry, skip forward a bit. If you feel it's going too deep just hang up. Maybe one day you'll come back to it. Oh, and don't overlook the footnotes, some have very interesting bits.
- acjohnson55 13y agoWhenever one is ready to devote some time and brainpower to mastering its concepts. It moves pretty incrementally, and there's nothing in there that's impossibly complicated to understand. It does probably require a bit more mental effort than understanding your typical OO paradigm. It's a great book--I highly recommend giving it a shot.