SICP is literally a textbook for programming 101 class. It's whole purpose is to teach programming to people who might have never programmed before.
I don't think its fair to continue the fiction that introduction to programming 101 at MIT is about pitching to people who have never done programming before any more than it is to pretend that people who get into top medical or law schools haven't had multiple years being coached to get into top medical or law schools.
Humbly, its not a beginner programming book in any reality-connected universe...
It was not and is not necessary to have extensive programming experience to get into a good engineering college in the USA. (Arguably middle schools and high schools should place more emphasis on the subject, but that’s not where we are today.) Many of the best professional programmers I know were first exposed to it in college. Some were first exposed to programming after finishing college, and taught themselves.
For someone who is not as well prepared as a typical first-year MIT student, something else might be better, but it’s reasonably accessible in my opinion. I would have loved to have a course like SICP as a high school student.
(Disclaimer: I have not directly evaluated their curriculum/textbook.)
This differs markedly from my own opinion about the proper goals of a ‘computer science’ course at the undergraduate level, which is to teach timeless principles and flexible thinking without bending to fashion (especially fashion which is now a decade out of date), and to prepare students for follow-up computer science courses such as data structures / algorithms, theory of computation, programming languages, or in a more applied direction databases, networking, graphics, operating systems, numerical analysis, machine learning, and so on. A lot of these follow-up courses will be substantially mathematical and will rely heavily on analytical skills developed in in introductory CS course and in mathematics courses (not just on programming skills per se).
But if updated for 2018 the authors’ curriculum would be appropriate as a course titled “introduction to programming” or the like. I agree it sounds like an improvement vs. first courses that start students out on C++ or Java (their main comparison in the linked paper).
YMMV.
That’s only a description of Newton’s method, plus an example on symbolic differentiation (2, respectively 6 pages in a book of over 600 pages, in my copy)
Both are about a tiny corner of differential calculus: differentiating ”expressions that are built up using only the operations of addition and multiplication with two arguments”. It doesn’t involve goniometric functions or integrals.
So, it is is about turning ax² + bx + c into 2ax + b. I don’t know when exactly I learnt that, but it was way before university, when I was somewhere between 13 and 16 years old. It was part of the normal curriculum.
”SICP could be challenging”
I would hope so. If it couldn’t be challenging, how are students supposed to learn from it?
I entered as a non-major so did it in c++ first. It only clicked when I went back to sicp. Could just be having done the material twice but I’ve always understood most cs concepts in a functional sense more easily.
Self-study SICP without any previous programming experience would be exceedingly tough.
I feel like SICP would be a perfect text for introductory CS, if there were a "pre-CS" course in high schools that was essentially equivalent to the current 100-level Discrete Mathematics courses.
Come into programming already knowing set theory, graph theory, computational complexity, etc. and SICP will make perfect sense.
It is described here in an excellent talk about the challenges of curriculum design https://youtu.be/5c0BvOlR5gs note the end of the talk he discusses how Calculus is secretly taught to them as well by keeping track of a video game state over time. Going from Bootstrap->SICP would be possible too.
You don't need to already understand programming to be able to use SICP. SICP doesn't need an intro (or to be modified), it is an intro. What you need to already understand, is math. Specifically, the kinds of math that SICP uses in its examples and problems—which aren't taught in high-school, but totally could be (100-level Discrete Maths has very few prerequisites; you could theoretically learn it in elementary school, though practically not, for mental-development reasons.)
SICP is, essentially, a book to teach programming to "mathematicians who have not necessarily ever heard of a computer." It works wonderfully when used as such. But the less mathematical grounding you have, the harder you'll struggle.
It's exactly like a textbook for one of those "Communications for Business" courses. If you're not a business student, then it'll be a bad communications textbook, because all the examples and problems are business-related.
You are right though I wish there was a course that taught set theory and complexity in HS. Anybody interested in learning both at the same time, there are intro discrete math books that also teach intro programming https://cs.wheaton.edu/~tvandrun/dmfp/ but not in the full CS101 coverage of SICP.
Typical introductory discrete math textbooks list high school precalculus as a prerequisite and recommend an introductory calculus course as very helpful additional background. You would have to teach something significantly different to someone with the background of a typical middle school / early high school student, because they are lacking quite a bit of the expected background concepts, terminology, and notation.
These subjects could certainly be taught to elementary school students, but slowly and with a lot of build-up and practice, over the course of years. The limiting factor is not primarily “mental development” (as in, some inherent change of brain wiring that inevitably happens with age) but rather substantial amounts of practice, prior exposure to related ideas, time spent digesting them, stamina/attention span/confidence at solving technical problems, etc.
That is more or less what this was meant to be:
Honestly, I think it is a superior intro-book for genuine beginners, compared to SICP, and a quick perusal of the two will allow most people to come to a conclusion not only about the level at which they are pitched, but which one is pedagogically superior for them in terms of both structure and writing.
Are they? I don't know if I remember hearing anyone complain about those before.
In TXR Lisp, which is quite CL-like in some places and deliberately so, I used the names succ, ssucc, and sssucc for adding 1, 2, 3, and 4. The inverses are pred, ppred, and pppred.
These are vaguely inspired by Hofstader's S0, SS0, SSS0 ... in Gödel, Escher, Bach as well a by caar, cddr, ... plus the dim memory of operators called succ and pred in Pascal).
SICP is not an introduction to programming as much as it is an introduction to computer science.
I mean, one of the key lectures is about differential calculus. Do you realize that at most universities, CS 101 students are not assumed to have taken calculus. Hell, a large fraction of CS 101 students will NEVER take calculus (non-majors who will instead opt for college algebra).
But that example itself is actually more of a red herring. The point is that the mathematical maturity does provide a lot of extremely useful background thinking/problem-solving skills that most CS 101 students haven't yet developed and will be developing for the first time in CS 101.
The same effect worked in reverse as they graduated MIT or worked on projects in more mainstream languages, though. Students would have to unlearn some of the elegant recursive formulations and strong abstraction abilities of Scheme and deal with languages that actually have strong industry adoption. That was a major factor [1] in the replacement of SICP with Python in MIT's intro programming class. Python has abundant library support that more closely mimicks what the programmer will have available and what challenges she'll face in the real world.
[1] https://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-inst...