3 ms·

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.

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.