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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Note to the unaware, both* this version and the classic (Scheme) version are Creative Commons-licensed and freely available online. (*edit: thanks to keithwinstein for enlightening me -- I wrongly thought it was just the one. The publisher's site doesn't advertise this at all!)

https://sicp.sourceacademy.org/ (JS version)

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html (1984 classic)

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https://sicp.sourceacademy.org/ brings me to something called "Comparison Edition". I was looking for a straight JS version with editable/executable code, and found it at the link named "Interactive SICP JS" (which takes you to https://sourceacademy.org/sicpjs/index)

The in-line editor is a bit intrusive (fills up most of my screen, unlike say eloquentjavascript.net) but it's still pretty neat to have run-able examples. Kudos to the creators.

Is this version the same as the one that's going to be released on paperback?

I believe they are both CC-licensed. See https://sicp.sourceacademy.org/

A ton of work seems to have gone into this -- they have a meta-circular evaluator in JavaScript (and it's not that much longer than the original Scheme)!

Very respectfully disagree; but long or short, this looks really bad:

    list("sequence",
         list(list("constant_declaration",
                   list("name", "size"), list("literal", 2)),
              list("binary_operator_combination", "*",
                   list("literal", 5), list("name", "size"))))

https://sourceacademy.org/sicpjs/4.1.2 ("4.1.2 Metalinguistic Abstraction / Representing Components")

This isn't an ideal language for doing this stuff. The Scheme version is completely transparent about what you're doing; whereas this kind of language makes you work through a thick veil of abstractions.

(This line doesn't occur in the Scheme version, but the analog would be (quote (let ((size 2)) (* size 5))). Which would you rather debug?)

I know which one I'd rather debug, but which one can a new student get started with faster? They are unlikely to already have a scheme interpreter on their computer.

It won't take longer than 15 minutes to get racket installed, and that's being extremely conservative. If you can't spend 15 minutes getting setup done, why would you finish a dense book on the theory of computation?

The scheme version was aimed at students who might never have touched a computer before.

Why should this book be different, though these days aimed at students who’d only operated a computer before.

When the Scheme version was written, all the programming languages were equally weird to incoming students. So Scheme was as good a starting point as any other.

Today, Scheme is still weird, but JavaScript is familiar. It's something the incoming students are at least likely to have heard of. So it makes more sense to ease them into the material with the familiar rather than drop them into something weird.

By that logic, North Korea is a better vacation spot than Niue, since most people are at least likely to have heard of North Korea.

(Just to be clear, that was intended as a friendly poke, not a scathing rebuke. I do think lisps are better suited for SICP than JS is for the reasons others have mentioned, but I’m not trying to be a jerk about it.)

It's not if the familiar language obscures the central ideas.

Making sense of those parentheses is genuinely hard for a newcomer, too. The Scheme version is more readable to you because you already know it - anyone who's actually working through this with a class level of effort instead of skimming pages is going to spend an equal amount of time learning how to read the syntax you quoted, and they'll be fine once they do.

JS is the WORST of both worlds.

With the scheme version, you have straight-up trees to work with.

With the Javascript version, you have to learn all about parsing rules and gotchas and then you STILL wind up with trees for everything.

There is also github repo https://github.com/source-academy/sicp/wiki with instruction how to generate various versions

That's wonderful! I was going to ask.

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