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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Would it be worth going through SCIP without prior knowledge of LISP (i.e. could I pick it up from the book) or is it better to have some knowledge beforehand?

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At the time the book was written it was not uncommon for a new MIT student to arrive without having used a computer at all. 6.001 was intended to be the first introduction to a computer so not only is no lisp assumed but no programming at all!

It also depends on how motivated enough you are. Even as early 2005 most of us in India couldn't afford computers. I remember we wrote 8085 programs all on paper. Limited time was available, with limited kits in the lab, but we were motivated enough to do it on paper alone.

These days where everything is supposed to be easy, newbie friendly, accommodating and all that. People have a tendency to quit early and expect the ecosystem to make it easy for them.

These days you get a decent computer under $100 if you use a Rasberry Pi. I could do anything for something like that a decade back.

I wouldn't quite say motivated - we had no choice. You either wrote and debugged the 8085 assembly on paper before you ran it on the board, or you didn't do it at all :)

While I understand (and respect) the sentiment, having gone through much the same, I wouldn't disparage something being newbie-friendly. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Edit: s/play down/disparage

Yes. Lisp is fundamentally simple and is introduced in the beginning. I can recommend Racket with the sicp language extension to get the dialect used in the book.

How is the math? I've heard it's not exactly easy.

I’m just finishing chapter 1 (1/5th of the book) and the math so far hasn’t been too challenging, but you should certainly go in with the expectation that you’ll do some Googling to figure out some context to complete the exercises.

SICP only uses a small subset of Scheme, and it's only using it as a minimal vehicle for exploring computer science. You can absolutely learn the amount of Scheme used in the book as you go (that's why they chose that subset: it's not supposed to distract you from the topics they're discussing; they're trying to get as close as they can to simple axioms), but you won't really "know Lisp" (or Scheme) in practical terms when you're done, either (you'll be well-equipped to pick it up quickly, though).

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