4 ms·

More like a spiritual successor to HtDP, which is somewhat opposed to the SICP philosophy, even though both use Scheme variants: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Public

More like a spiritual successor to HtDP, which is somewhat opposed to the SICP philosophy, even though both use Scheme variants: http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-htdp-vs-sicp-journal/ http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h...

krat0sprakhar 12y ago
How is HtDP opposed to the SICP philosophy? From my reading both come off as espousing the more or less same ideas for building programs.
- pgbovine 12y ago
  read the linked paper :)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- shriramkmurthi 12y ago
  What @pgbovine said. (-:
- wtbob 12y ago
  The paper describes it; it's only 14 pages and is quite readable.
- nhjk 12y ago
  Here's a good quote from the paper "... sicp suffers from a serious flaw. While the course briefly explains programming as the definition of some recursive procedures, it does not discuss how programmers determine which procedures are needed or how to organize these procedures. While it explains that programs benefit from functions as first-class values, it does not show how programmers discover the need for this power. While SICP introduces the idea that programs should use abstraction layers, it never mentions how or when programmers should introduce such layers of abstraction. Finally, while the book discusses the pros and cons of stateful modularity versus stream-based modularity, it does so without explaining how to recognize situations in which one is more useful than the other."
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    True, having discovered SICP while deep in college, I already went through many languages, paradigms and such, giving ground to SICP ideas. For a newcomer it might be pure fluff.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  One is that SICP had a fair amount of math (I believe caused by Electrical Engineer authors), so while you're trying to grok recursive logic, you also have to deal with arithmetic invariants (convergence with reals). HtDP had much less. Based on https://www.coursera.org/course/programdesign https://www.coursera.org/course/programdesign (which is inspired by HtDP) you only deal with simple data and logic but focus on regular and precise analysis of ad-hoc types (at first) to derive solid program structures. I felt anyone could follow the ideas in it.
  - hga 12y ago
    One is that SICP had a fair amount of math (I believe caused by Electrical Engineer authors) Errr, not really, both are CS professors, although Sussman is very interested in EE and teaching it. Rather, it was written for MIT students, who arrive at a bare minimum ready to learn the calculus, and taking the SICP course 6.001 was strongly discouraged during your first term (it's a lot of work, even for students who know programming and Lisp). And the core curriculum 6.001-4 that all EECS students had to take back then included two math not optional EE courses. MIT's vision of what a CS student should know includes a lot of EE, which is common in department that started from EE (e.g. UC Berkeley), and less so in ones that didn't, e.g. that started from Math. That said, most any MIT student could take 6.001 and benefit, the use of math is simply based on the fact that it was a common body of stuff all the students taking 6.001 would know.
  - shriramkmurthi 12y ago
    SICP and HtDP are two very different books that have the unfortunate feature of using somewhat similar languages (which are syntactically very similar, hence causing the confusion). I was recently re-reading SICP, and was amazed by how cleverly structured it is. It somehow goes for an entire fifth of a book without any data structure at all. It retrospect, I consider it something of a virtuoso achievement to have pulled that off while writing a book that is utterly compelling on every page. However, the only way it can achieve that is by focusing _entirely_ on what we call "domain knowledge". As the kind of person who has always loved the play of numbers, I was immersed fully and barely noticed what was happening when I read it as a student. To most students, however, this material is both uninteresting and difficult, and difficult material that isn't even relevant to the domain is especially uncompellling. Of course, diving into data early means you need a lot more help structuring your programs. HtDP focuses precisely on that problem, _using_ the data to drive the structure (inspired by earlier efforts such as The Little Lisper). And this highlights exactly how very different the two books are. It is much like the comment about the US and UK: "two countries separated by a common language". The coincidence of using (almost) the same language in both books has, sadly, created a great deal of confusion on this point.
yzzxy 12y ago
Interesting... It seems to me that FP is having quite a renaissance recently, which could limit the relevance of that paper's contentions today. I'm also seeing quite a backlash against OOP and especially OOP as the One True Paradigm that it was pushed as in throughout the 00s - this can be seen not only in FP language growth but also in the design of other new languages like Go that lack many OOP features. Honestly, I would argue for the "Never Compromise" route for undergraduate regardless of current trends. I've found firsthand that mid-to-high-achieving high school students are able to grep SICP just fine, even if they haven't been introduced to calculus as of yet. But I haven't read HtDP or PPL yet, so I can't really pass judgement on which book would be better.
- shriramkmurthi 12y ago
  The paper's premise is a broad one. Its authors are hard-core functional programmers, but believe that eventually students have to learn something beyond just pure FP. Too often, introductory curricula are designed with a "screw what happens later" attitude, which ends up being self-defeating. The paper's point is that they should instead provide a gradual progression, and that this progression should be over at least two different time-scales.
- dagw 12y ago
  It seems to me that FP is having quite a renaissance recently It seems that FP is always having a renaissance. I distinctly recall lots of people (including me) talking in 2001-2002 about the big FP renaissance just round corner. I also recall a few old school lisper rolling their eyes at us and saying that they where saying the same thing back in the early-mid 80's.
  - shriramkmurthi 12y ago
    Doesn't mean it's not true. There is now hard-core industrial use growing, which has never quite been true in the past two decades. Not to mention, mainstream languages have mostly all now accepted the starting premise of FP (closures as first-class values). That's the first step; there are many more to come. Old Lispers' eyes are stuck in a permanent roll position, like the Agena-Gemini 8 dock.
taeric 12y ago
I am curious what evidence there is that SICP is responsible for "[many introductory] courses quickly disappeared again due to shortcomings of the book and the whimsies of Scheme."
- shriramkmurthi 12y ago
  It's a comment based on our view of the historical record, having been present during the rise and fall of SICP. It is not a formal evidence-based claim.
  - taeric 12y ago
    Fair enough. And I hasten to add that I do not have any counter evidence. I think I heard rumors of the book when I was at gatech in the late 90s. Never took a course in that book, though. I wasn't in CS. CmpE was an interesting beast back then. It seemed that the money was heavily pushing Java and that most curriculum immediately jumped to where they thought future money was. Sometimes they would back off and try to get back to a more theoretical or instruction based methodology, but would always hedge with a language that was seen as friendly to industry.
  - shriramkmurthi 12y ago
    @taeric, by "the book" do you mean SICP or HtDP? HtDP was used for a few years at Georgia Tech, and then that stopped. There are various views on why. (-:
    - taeric 12y ago
      Apologies for the ambiguous pronoun. Sadly, I wouldn't have known one from the other back then. When I found SICP, some of the things I recalled hearing from CS friends made sense. So, I assumed that was the book. Curious if there are any expansions on why it was dropped.

krat0sprakhar 12y ago

How is HtDP opposed to the SICP philosophy? From my reading both come off as espousing the more or less same ideas for building programs.

pgbovine 12y ago
read the linked paper :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
shriramkmurthi 12y ago
What @pgbovine said. (-:
wtbob 12y ago
The paper describes it; it's only 14 pages and is quite readable.
nhjk 12y ago
Here's a good quote from the paper "... sicp suffers from a serious flaw. While the course briefly explains programming as the definition of some recursive procedures, it does not discuss how programmers determine which procedures are needed or how to organize these procedures. While it explains that programs benefit from functions as first-class values, it does not show how programmers discover the need for this power. While SICP introduces the idea that programs should use abstraction layers, it never mentions how or when programmers should introduce such layers of abstraction. Finally, while the book discusses the pros and cons of stateful modularity versus stream-based modularity, it does so without explaining how to recognize situations in which one is more useful than the other."
- agumonkey 12y ago
  True, having discovered SICP while deep in college, I already went through many languages, paradigms and such, giving ground to SICP ideas. For a newcomer it might be pure fluff.
agumonkey 12y ago
One is that SICP had a fair amount of math (I believe caused by Electrical Engineer authors), so while you're trying to grok recursive logic, you also have to deal with arithmetic invariants (convergence with reals). HtDP had much less. Based on https://www.coursera.org/course/programdesign https://www.coursera.org/course/programdesign (which is inspired by HtDP) you only deal with simple data and logic but focus on regular and precise analysis of ad-hoc types (at first) to derive solid program structures. I felt anyone could follow the ideas in it.
- hga 12y ago
  One is that SICP had a fair amount of math (I believe caused by Electrical Engineer authors) Errr, not really, both are CS professors, although Sussman is very interested in EE and teaching it. Rather, it was written for MIT students, who arrive at a bare minimum ready to learn the calculus, and taking the SICP course 6.001 was strongly discouraged during your first term (it's a lot of work, even for students who know programming and Lisp). And the core curriculum 6.001-4 that all EECS students had to take back then included two math not optional EE courses. MIT's vision of what a CS student should know includes a lot of EE, which is common in department that started from EE (e.g. UC Berkeley), and less so in ones that didn't, e.g. that started from Math. That said, most any MIT student could take 6.001 and benefit, the use of math is simply based on the fact that it was a common body of stuff all the students taking 6.001 would know.
- shriramkmurthi 12y ago
  SICP and HtDP are two very different books that have the unfortunate feature of using somewhat similar languages (which are syntactically very similar, hence causing the confusion). I was recently re-reading SICP, and was amazed by how cleverly structured it is. It somehow goes for an entire fifth of a book without any data structure at all. It retrospect, I consider it something of a virtuoso achievement to have pulled that off while writing a book that is utterly compelling on every page. However, the only way it can achieve that is by focusing _entirely_ on what we call "domain knowledge". As the kind of person who has always loved the play of numbers, I was immersed fully and barely noticed what was happening when I read it as a student. To most students, however, this material is both uninteresting and difficult, and difficult material that isn't even relevant to the domain is especially uncompellling. Of course, diving into data early means you need a lot more help structuring your programs. HtDP focuses precisely on that problem, _using_ the data to drive the structure (inspired by earlier efforts such as The Little Lisper). And this highlights exactly how very different the two books are. It is much like the comment about the US and UK: "two countries separated by a common language". The coincidence of using (almost) the same language in both books has, sadly, created a great deal of confusion on this point.

yzzxy 12y ago

Interesting... It seems to me that FP is having quite a renaissance recently, which could limit the relevance of that paper's contentions today. I'm also seeing quite a backlash against OOP and especially OOP as the One True Paradigm that it was pushed as in throughout the 00s - this can be seen not only in FP language growth but also in the design of other new languages like Go that lack many OOP features. Honestly, I would argue for the "Never Compromise" route for undergraduate regardless of current trends. I've found firsthand that mid-to-high-achieving high school students are able to grep SICP just fine, even if they haven't been introduced to calculus as of yet. But I haven't read HtDP or PPL yet, so I can't really pass judgement on which book would be better.

shriramkmurthi 12y ago
The paper's premise is a broad one. Its authors are hard-core functional programmers, but believe that eventually students have to learn something beyond just pure FP. Too often, introductory curricula are designed with a "screw what happens later" attitude, which ends up being self-defeating. The paper's point is that they should instead provide a gradual progression, and that this progression should be over at least two different time-scales.
dagw 12y ago
It seems to me that FP is having quite a renaissance recently It seems that FP is always having a renaissance. I distinctly recall lots of people (including me) talking in 2001-2002 about the big FP renaissance just round corner. I also recall a few old school lisper rolling their eyes at us and saying that they where saying the same thing back in the early-mid 80's.
- shriramkmurthi 12y ago
  Doesn't mean it's not true. There is now hard-core industrial use growing, which has never quite been true in the past two decades. Not to mention, mainstream languages have mostly all now accepted the starting premise of FP (closures as first-class values). That's the first step; there are many more to come. Old Lispers' eyes are stuck in a permanent roll position, like the Agena-Gemini 8 dock.

taeric 12y ago

I am curious what evidence there is that SICP is responsible for "[many introductory] courses quickly disappeared again due to shortcomings of the book and the whimsies of Scheme."

shriramkmurthi 12y ago
It's a comment based on our view of the historical record, having been present during the rise and fall of SICP. It is not a formal evidence-based claim.
- taeric 12y ago
  Fair enough. And I hasten to add that I do not have any counter evidence. I think I heard rumors of the book when I was at gatech in the late 90s. Never took a course in that book, though. I wasn't in CS. CmpE was an interesting beast back then. It seemed that the money was heavily pushing Java and that most curriculum immediately jumped to where they thought future money was. Sometimes they would back off and try to get back to a more theoretical or instruction based methodology, but would always hedge with a language that was seen as friendly to industry.
- shriramkmurthi 12y ago
  @taeric, by "the book" do you mean SICP or HtDP? HtDP was used for a few years at Georgia Tech, and then that stopped. There are various views on why. (-:
  - taeric 12y ago
    Apologies for the ambiguous pronoun. Sadly, I wouldn't have known one from the other back then. When I found SICP, some of the things I recalled hearing from CS friends made sense. So, I assumed that was the book. Curious if there are any expansions on why it was dropped.