Manifest: Tuesday 6 February 2001
| Assignments | |
| Thursday, 22 February | Problem Set 2 |
Read before Thursday's class:
- Prakash Panangaden's Notes on the Lambda-Calculus, August 2000.
From what I've read, I get the impression this book was written in a
rush, and with the purpose of cramming tons of nonsense and filler in
just to have an excuse to present Scheme (a pathetic language). The
authors claim to present a view of programming that's widely
applicable, and state that top-down (i.e. procedural) programming is
by far not the best way to think about programs abstractly. Well, they
don't stick to their promise. They present a biased, one sided
promotion of scheme as the best language out there. No attempt is made
to make comparisons between functional languages like scheme and
normal languages like C. The end result, you come out knowing scheme
and a few boring applications of it, but can't apply any of it to real
programming tasks. This proves this book is just a fancy concotion of
some egghead professor who has no idea what happens in the real
world. I found many explanations to be incoherent and
contradictory. The whole approach is divorced from the computing
practice. This is no 21 day book, in fact, you can spend 21 months on
it and still not learn a thing, because there's nothing but worthless
garbage here.
Amazon.com review of SICP (see other reviews)
