Why and How to Start Your SICP Trek
hackerretreat.com
hackerretreat.com
Understudy: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/understudy/id782635884
The setup is basically like private music lessons. We pair you with a somewhat more advanced student also doing SICP. The deal is to
(1) Work on SICP by yourself during the week
(2) Once a week, discuss the material with your more advanced partner. The app builds in a videochat + whiteboard communication tool (you can see it in the app screenshots).
(3) When you get about a month in, also start discussing with someone who is just starting out. When you help that person understand, it very much improves your own understanding.
Basically, it gives you good discussion with people who are genuinely interested in SICP.
We've been running it in beta for a while – see https://twitter.com/understudyapp .
In all honesty, though, this sounds like a really cool idea. I may check it out.
Conversation isn't zero sum.
The actually app however seems to only run on one make of tablet (that I don't happen to own). I could be wrong, but it seems to me that most people'll be doing SICP exercises on a real computer, rather than a tablet. Why did you decide not to do, say, a webapp - or even to just assign the pairs and let them use whatever communication medium they have in common (skype, hangouts, IRC, whatever)?
It makes it really easy to gesture and discuss visually.
As far as iPad vs Android - that's just because we have to start somewhere. Also, I worked at Apple for 7 years, so it's definitely the environment I'm quickest at programming.
That said, if people actually like what we're doing, who knows. The main point is the conversation, the tech just enables it.
(Oh - and yeah, you definitely do the SICP exercises on the computer. That's by yourself, though. When we chat once a week, we do often write out snippets of code or problems, but the use of the interpreter already happened.)
It means that Thursday evening, when you're tired, it's easier to pick yourself up and work, because doing so gets you a _better_conversation_ on Saturday. I'm a cellist - this comes from private music lessons (and also karate).
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_Sigma_Problem . In that study, the median person learning one-to-one performed at the 98th percentile in a control group. That's huge!
The problem I've had when asking similar questions on another forum (not on #scheme) was that people would often assume I was trying to get help on homework and rudely blow me off (I've been out of uni for over a decade). So I stopped asking for help, and muddle through on my own.
Why does your app have this rating? Don't get me wrong, I love Lisps as much as the next person, but...
More seriously, is it because of the video-chat feature?
Yes. :-) When people tutor kids, they make sure there's always another adult in the room. That's hard for us, so no kids.
Live remote video-learning, I've found, tends to require a good friend of comparable skill level to work. If you discover that strangers can make this work sustainably, that's definitely interesting and important.
This is an asymmetric setup. You talk through whatever material the less-advanced student got through that week. More like YC office hours.
These can be good precursors before starting on SICP. I have to say, though, that I have never felt comfortable with LISP's syntax. The parentheses and the prefix notation are convenient for the parser, not the programmer. Pyret http://www.pyret.org/index.html might be a step in the right direction.
That said, HtDP's focus is very different from SICP, and I would not sequence one before the other. HtDP focuses on a methodology for writing robust maintainable software. It emphasizes specifications and testing and functional procedures.
SICP is focused on computer science and emphasizes much higher levels of abstraction - e.g. the *nix signal processing model, logic programming, constraint programming, stack machines and dealing with concurrency. It is more directly an introduction to Computer Science [despite Ableson's questioning the utility of the term 'computer science'] whereas HtDP is more of an introduction to the practice of programming.
Philosophically, SICP is ok with the idea of placing the student in over their head, e.g. the digital logic simulator and various mathematical examples treat digital logic and mathematics and banking as domain knowledge that the programmer might not have, but does not need in order to create sound abstractions.
[And Kickzales's course on Coursera was I awesome, I took the first version last summer.]
For anyone interested we will help you get setup and started, no prior programming needed.
We are running section 1.3 this month, so there is not much to catch up! Also, anyone who wants to work it their own pace is welcome too!
http://www.meetup.com/Clojadelphia/events/172933722/
Paul hasn't put up the info for the 1.3 online session yet, join the Clojadelphia group to get updates when he does.
Still a very good article, with great arguments for why the book is a must-read. Great links too. I would also include something easy like Realm of Racket (or Land of Lisp) as a good first-date before shacking up with SICP.
Hacker Retreat does look great though. Wish I had the free time to give it a try.
SICP is always "on" at Hacker Retreat - I've always got SICP buffers open. If you're able to work remotely from Berlin, consider coming to Batch-02 this summer.
It seems heavier on math than it really is because (I believe) the authors want the reader to see the parallels between math notation (functional, declarative, concise) and Lisp implementation (also functional, declarative, and quite concise).
A person no more needs extensive understanding of mathematics than they need such understanding of accounting or image processing.
That said, domain knowledge is helpful, but so is being able to work in fields which are over one's head. The big ideas are not the maths, but the abstractions which are applicable to many fields.
My advice is focus on the parts you understand [this is Knuth's recommendation for The Art of Computer Programming as well] and plan on coming back later as your knowledge increases. SICP can be digested in small chunks over time.
Something challenging yet doable for a determined independent student.
I've been looking around for a good way to learn type theory via self-study, and my current plan is to go through these courses on my own:
1) http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/courses/typesys/ 2) http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~pl/classes/CMSC336-Winter08/
1 uses Robert Harper's Practical Foundations for Programming Languages (and was taught by him) and 2 uses PFPL plus Benjamin Pierce's Types and Programming Languages. Both courses have lecture notes and readings for each session as well as homework assignments with solutions which ought to make them straightforward to go through on your own.
There's also these Type/Category/Proof Theory Foundations videos (with Robert Harper as well): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8Ky8lYL8-Oh7awp0sqa8...
I found these by doing some Googling and evaluating various forums/Stack Exchange posts; if anyone has any better suggestions I would love to hear them. (I haven't done SICP in depth and now, of course, I'm considering putting this plan on hold and doing SICP instead...)
I haven't found anything like SICP (thus my question), but I feel compelled to mention two great practical repos I discovered yesterday thanks to HN, both of which are teaching me a lot about practical type systems:
1. https://github.com/tomprimozic/type-systems (great practical intro to Hindley-Milner and variations)
2. https://github.com/typeclassy/plzoo (collection of mini languages implemented in OCaml, many of which feature different type systems)
Edit: Can't reply to jcurbo yet, but I'd be really interested in that Haskell link if you can remember it.
Something on the order of 1 or 2 weeks in length, super compressed that gives working devs a chance to learn something new or explore something outside of their normal job. I'd love to do something like this, particularly in an exotic location, but against a set amount of time that doesn't require me to quit my job.
We've adjusted the format of the current Hacker Retreat to accommodate people working (remotely, on their startup, etc) - 20% of your time is committed to learning, the rest of the time is up to you. The time-span is over 2 months minimum. We're currently taking applications for the Batch-02 starting in May/June.
Super-compressed, 1-2 week retreats are something we've thought about, especially for advanced topics like data science and functional programming...may do it later, but not this summer.
I love the hack camp idea and chance to fully dive into something with like minded people, it just needs to fit into something I can spend my vacation days on.
Is there some prerequisite library for these exercises? Or am I missing the point and these are not actually intended to be run?
1. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-15.html...
Check it out here:
The DrRacket SICP package has only one primitive image, "einstein".
...but don't see the code needed there to draw graphics. Eli's online solution did, I believe, manage to get graphics working with a non-MIT-Scheme Scheme. But it's not necessary to have running code here to get the benefits of the exercises (unlike later in Chapter 3 and 4!).
mit-scheme < foo.scm
mit-scheme foo.scm#!/bin/sh
mit-scheme < $@
To give an example, the hardest math I can remember is one exercise where they ask you to _prove_ the equation listed if you search for "closed form" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number .
I'm relatively sure that the point of this exercise was just to drive home that performance characteristics of a problem can be non-obvious. We just finished making an O(n) implementation of Fibonacci numbers and feel pretty good about it, but oh wait, you can actually do it in O(1).
However, to literally answer your question, the math used in exercises mostly tops out at polynomial algebra (like, adding X^2 + 3X + 1 to 3X^2 + 3), with a little bit of calculus - namely taking derivatives (and maybe integrals? I forget) of polynomials. The calculus is not used to solve a problem - rather you're implementing a program that lets the user take derivatives of polynomials.
You might also try starting with the videos, which are more-code, less-equations. But to get maximum benefits, one must do the exercises (at least some of them), so you'll still need the book.
xuanji.appspot.com/isicp/
You should consider adding a TL;DR at the beginning, to explain what it is all about.
Or would it be pointless to read through the book without a REPL/command line next to it?