
Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP - tosh
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335
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tzs
> The same is true at the software level, since programming environments
> consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. According to
> Sussman, his students spend most of their time reading manuals for these
> libraries to figure out how to stitch them together to get a job done.

You don't need an MIT education to do that kind of programming, and do it
well.

There was an interesting lecture Theodore Roosevelt gave in 1911 at a small
vocational school in Pasadena, California called Throop Polytechnic Institute.
He said:

ROOSEVELT> I believe that the most important work for us in America today, in
the way of education, is to train men so that they can do the most efficient
possible work in the vocations they undertake; and I also regard it as of the
utmost importance to train the exceptional man on a purely cultural basis. In
other words, I want to see institutions like Throop turn out perhaps ninety-
nine of every hundred students as men who are to do any given pieces of
industrial work better than any one else can do them; I want to see those men
do the kind of work that is now being done on the Panama Canal and on the
great irrigation projects in the interior of this country---and the one
hundredth man I want to see with the kind of cultural scientific training that
will make him and his fellows the matrix out of which you can occasionally
develop a man like your great astronomer, George Ellery Hale."

A few years later, that school changed its name to California Institute of
Technology, and made it its mission to concentrate on Roosevelt's "hundredth
man".

I think SICP is the kind of preparation that a hundredth man needs for
programming.

------
sctb
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628080).
Unfortunately we have to have a base case for this recursion, which is to
treat this as a duplicate.

------
davexunit
SICP changed the way I think about computing. Despite being a book intended
for freshmen, there's lots of interesting things to learn about even for
experienced programmers, and the footnotes are terrific.

------
vr46
It may have lost relevance at MIT but all around London, companies are still
using examples from SICP in their programming interviews and tests. Does this
mean these selection schemes are stupid and irrelevant or does SICP still
possess the power to sway and influence? Just not in the way the authors
expected?

~~~
sytelus
In my experience, SICP's main effect was developing "analysis" muscle. I
remember reading first 3 chapters and realizing that we are starting to write
fairly complex stuff but still our language doesn't even have assignments let
alone for loops or other bread and butter of programming. It's that moment, it
dawns on you what computer program really means. It's not prescription of
step-by-step instructions, but set of ideas that come together, compose with
each other and make a whole that is far bigger than sum of small pieces. In
SICP, you actually start at "atomic" level to build real world objects. I
think this exercise is still relevant at least in that way and chances are
that SICP readers are better at grasping and using abstractions.

~~~
vr46
Yes, I agree - I think this is why so much was also used in the Coursera Scala
course to build up the student's understanding of the functional aspects in
composing software. Must revise SICP sometime soon.

