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"Heh, but that doesn't work either..." Well, the point of my original comment may have become obscured, I'm not sure. It was that HtDP is not so much a book a
by michaelsbradley 12y ago
"Heh, but that doesn't work either..."
Well, the point of my original comment may have become obscured, I'm not sure.
It was that HtDP is not so much a book about Racket/Lisp/Scheme, as it is a book that aims primarily to impart sound fundamentals for the design of computer programs, regardless of the language used. And as I wrote previously, that becomes quite apparent by the end of Part 1, when the "design recipe" has seen its second major restatement.
By the way, I am only familiar with the 2nd edition of HtDP. I can't really comment on the 1st edition, and it's possible that it gives a different impression.
- hga 12y agoAh, I get you. Yeah, SICP, going from the 2nd Edition because my previous edition copies were tossed or whatever, is that too, but aimed at teaching different things. Except for the 4th Chapter, Metalinguistic Abstractions, which of course introduces the metacircular interpreter ... but if that's "The Maxwell Equations of CS".... That chapter has other treats, and ends with logic programming. And per Wikipedia and my general knowledge: "Before SICP, the introductory courses were almost always filled with learning the details of some programming language, while SICP focuses on finding general patterns from specific problems and building software tools that embody each pattern." But of course, even if we agree this is the way to teach introductory courses, there is much debate on what to teach, with MIT abandoning SICP in the post-doc.com crash panic including a crash in enrollment. (More than halved after being a steady 2/5th of the undergraduate body for decades. It's gone back up, BTW, along with Stanford's. CMU only accepts 135 students into its program, and UCB, being a state school, probably also has limits, explicit or implicit.)