Missing the point

OK, I'll admit. I've jumped on the SICP bandwagon. I've worked through about half the book¹ and am really liking it. Of course I've come to it a bit late to the book not being a computer science graduate, though it seems these days one probably wouldn't get exposed to it anyway or so I hear. It seems like one of those books that's great but people dread taking a class that uses it, kind of like Jackson or Goldstein for physics majors. Anyways, had the bandwagon not come by for me to jump on I probably wouldn't have ever found it so here's to bandwagons.

Enough blowing smoke up Abelman and Sussman's asses about their book. It's great, we all get it. Though it seems like some people have decided they liked the book but not the language and are going to do something about it. And to me it seems like that's missing the point. Sort of like how people go all ga-ga over peanut butter and chocolate together², like somehow these two things are just meant to go together. Well in this case they are. A&B chose lisp for a reason, and not just because they're lisp weenies.

The way I feel about it is that there are certain language categories that everyone programmer should learn at least one language from. They are machine level ³, static imperative ⁴, dynamic ⁵, functional ⁶ and lisp ⁷.

Learning a machine level language will help you understand what the machine is doing with your code. Learning lisp will teach you what the compiler is doing with your code. Think of it as the assembly language of computation, whereas assembly is the, well, assembly language of computers. That's why A&B chose it. While there are other languages that look more like lambda calculus (ML anyone?), when you're writing lisp you're writing out the abstract syntax trees for your program. And understanding how you're programs goes from source code to a computation is powerful stuff.

Now I don't want to bag on the folks at SICP in other language but if you use another language when working through SICP then you're sort of missing the point. Going back and using the exercises later when you're learning a new language is fine, but the first time through use lisp. It won't bite but you might wear out your ( and ) keys.

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1. Kind of slow going, but when you've got a two year old at home you don't get a many solid blocks of time to too deeply into things.↩
2. Never understood that one myself. Sure they taste OK together but I'm actually happier keeping them apart. But what do I know, I don't Even like my ice cream with chunky bits in it and have problems using my microwave.↩
3. C is probably good enough but some assembly wouldn't hurt.↩
4. Java, C#, C++, etc. For better or worse it's where the jobs are so you probably can't avoid learning at least one of these language.↩
5. Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc.
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6. Preferably pure, lazy and strongly typed, but I guess we can compromise on a point or two.↩