ughitsaaron

Part of the point of SICP is to be generic about its programming principles. The core principles and concepts are independent of any particular programming language (so long as it has first class functions, and probably a few other common features). Since Scheme has virtually no syntax it was an ideal language for Ableson & Sussman’s course. It’s notable that SICP spends hardly any time teaching the language.

I’ve never understood, therefore, the motivation behind trying to “translate” SICP into a language like JS (or Python, etc.) It over emphasizes the importance of the preferred language in a way that very obviously undermines the book.

The point being: if you’re gonna do SICP do it in Scheme. You’ll get more out of it.

I get ads for this all the time but still have no idea what I could do with it.

I really love that book and also couldn’t help but think about it while reading this.

I just want to call out how much I appreciate the comparison of “vibe coding” to the endless scroll.

> When you watch someone who knows what they are doing, you'll see them looping over the following steps:

> Build a mental model of the requirements

> Write code that (hopefully?!) does that

> Build a mental model of what the code actually does

> Identify the differences, and update the code (or the requirements).

This is pretty right on but I think it leaves out an aspect of writing code that I think is often pretty under appreciated. Code does two things at once: it provides a set of instructions to a machine and it communicates the authors' understanding of the program behavior those instructions are intended to express. I think this is a large part of what makes programming so fascinating and frustrating. It's what's behind the cliche that "naming things" is one of the hardest parts of programming. In growing software systems it's often not enough that a feature's implementation works. Ideally, that implementation should impose a minimum barrier to understanding for contributors to do something with it afterward. I'm not convinced this is an aspect of software development that LLMs will be able to meaningfully achieve.

I really agree. I think this is particularly peculiar to English speakers because the mix of origin in our vocabulary is such a grab bag.