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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

The curriculum is too artificial and disjoint from the rest of their CS degree.

That was my takeaway from CS61A at Berkeley. I thought that Scheme was incredibly elegant and I was disappointed that we never used it again. The profs sure were pleased with themselves at the end of CS61A and I imagined later that they thought their preferred outcome would have been that we pursued a PhD using Jikes. SICP was the text which everyone bought and no one (that I knew) read and I tried. We had no assigned readings; it simply meant to be worshiped. It comes up on HN but never in conversation. No one quotes SICP.

I'll look at HTDP.

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As I remember it, the book SICP itself wasn't really the core of CS61A... the lectures and slides were, and they drew off the concepts in SICP. No one read the book, but we learned from the (fairly good) lectures and explanations of the concepts, and especially the projects of course.

Those concepts were and remain a foundation for how I think about programming—at the level of elegant structure and short modular thinking. Software engineering and architecture is something different, and has its own class (CS169) which was far more valuable and important for those skills at that higher level.

I dunno. It was a good foundation. I've looked through SICP and I still recognize the concepts, the lectures matched it fairly well. But you're right—no one read the book.

Are you guys talking about an older iteration of 61A? It doesn’t really make sense to read SICP nowadays if the course is taught in Python.

Must be, I'm pretty old. :) Would have been 61A circa 2002.

I quote "programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute" fairly often to students, which is from the 1st ed preface.

That just shows that's as far as people get in the book!

I binged the whole thing on a long bus trip once. Didn't implement much of it, but enjoyed the read.

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