Birbla

Discussion summary

A 1986 video lecture series on SICP is highly regarded for its presentation. Many recommend using Scheme over JavaScript for studying SICP.

What the discussion says

  • The lectures are considered a classic and well-produced.
  • Scheme is recommended for learning SICP due to its simplicity and alignment with the book.
  • JavaScript is seen as less suitable for this purpose.
“Seeing the metacircular evaluator built live is remarkable.”
— tangsoupgallery
“Scheme reads like pseudo-code with parentheses.”
— submeta

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  • Hacker News
  • I always recommend these lectures, awesome!
    by Aejkatappaja
  • Reading SICP was some of the best advice I got from /g/
    by midtake
  • These sound a little better than I remember. I wonder if the sound was cleaned up?
    by mbrezu
  • The audio is so bad on these lectures.

    Is there any way to clean them up?

    by boobsbr
  • What could someone interested in systems programming gain from this?
    by xqb64
  • these talks distill out the core questions of topics like mutability and state management and abstraction. almost uniquely so. so I consider them deeply relevant to systems programming in as much that its primarily concerned with..state management and abstraction.

    unless you mean 'systems programming' as just 'the crap one does to try to glue together all the grotty pre-existing systems' and 'developing a good sense of taste about 3rd party libraries', in which case no, its not really very relevant.

    although even here there is insight, I watched a video of Sussman describing why they were putting down SICP and demanding that MIT develop new introductory courses. he was so graceful and considered, putting his polished jewels away. the time when we could reasonably be expected to see across and through all the layers of abstraction was over.

    by convolvatron
  • You don't have to do the exercises or follow along with the book. No matter if you are new to the field or have decades of experience: almost everyone would benefit from watching these videos if they haven't already (or done an SICP course).
    by xenadu02
  • I worked through these videos and the full book. Via news groups I organized an in-person study group. What a blast and a big unlock for me. The study group started having attrition about halfway through the book.
    by ozten
  • This is how I learned lisp. I then went on to learn Clojure and built a career around it.
    by j_m_b
  • Fantastic. How did you learn Clojure? I'm a bit of a fan.
    by davidpapermill
  • Cannot recommend these enough. Watch the first one and you'll be hooked
    by bloppe
  • I tried SICP straight from the book once, but I think the lectures are much better and the book acts as a supplemental reference.
    by dirteater_
  • Thank you! Will try it like this.
    by barrenko
  • That is indeed how University learning used to work, for about 1000 years
    by easytiger
  • Every programmer should learn LISP. or at least give an earnest attempt to study it. The vast majority of applied programmers only know how to think like C programmers (procedural). LISP is a “beautiful” language in that it is about concepts, not hardware. Totally changed my brain when I worked on a graduate project for a few years at my Alma mater in 1990.
    by sanmarzano
  • If you want to work through SICP, you can use MIT Scheme, but another option is to use Racket or DrRacket, with this add-on package: https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/
    by neilv
  • Awesome!

    I was just about to ask just that question?

    Thank you, SM

    by SilentM68
  • MIT Scheme is the simplest thing that might work.
    by brudgers
  • I second the recommmendation, for these two systems with a caveat. MIT Scheme has not been made to run on Apple Silicon, though with a few tricks, the amd64 version is usable on a modern Mac (this will presumably go away once Apple takes away Rosetta2). Racket might therefore be a better choice.

    It is possible to use pretty much any decent Scheme system with SICP, but the language has changed since even the Second Edition, so I don't recommend it. That said, once you are working on your own projects, nothing stops you from using a different system, even though you might have to RTFM to see modern equivalents to ancient idioms.

    by vincent-manis
  • I think we should only be recommending MIT Scheme. Everything else has got too much going on and can become distracting, for the purposes of education.
    by functionmouse