SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)

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__turbobrew__ ◴[16 Nov 24 20:40 UTC] No.42159121[source]▶

It’s interesting, SICP and other many other “classic” texts talk about designing programs, but these days I think the much more important skill is designing systems.

I don’t know if distributed systems is consider part of “Computer Science” but it is a much more common problem that I see needs to be solved.

I try to write systems in the simplest way possible and then use observability tools to figure out where the design is deficient and then maybe I will pull out a data structure or some other “computer sciency” thing to solve that problem. It turns out that big O notation and runtime complexity doesn’t matter the majority of the time and you can solve most problems with arrays and fast CPUs. And even when you have runtime problems you should profile the program to find the hot spots.

What computer science doesn’t teach you is how memory caching works in CPUs. Your fancy graph algorithm may have good runtime complexity but it completely hoses the CPU cache and you may have been able to go faster with an array with good cache usage.

The much more common problems I have is how to deal with fault tolerance, correctness in distributed locks and queues, and system scalability.

Maybe I am just biased because I have a computer/electrical engineering background.

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1. tkiolp4 ◴[16 Nov 24 21:19 UTC] No.42159448[source]▶

>>42159121 #

I find books like SICP interesting and not very useful. I love reading them because I like this stuff, but I don’t get to apply their teachings in real world software. It’s a problem because naturally I want to spend my time reading these kind of books, but if I do that I would be jobless. I need to divide my time between reading pearls like SICP and boring Kafka/Postgres/Golang/K8s/AWS documentation.

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2. lovecg ◴[16 Nov 24 22:07 UTC] No.42159780[source]▶

>>42159448 (TP) #

I don’t find them useful in the sense of directly applying practical techniques in my day job, but I consider them somewhat necessary background reading to get into the right state of mind. You can very quickly tell when someone never acquired any academic knowledge in this area (or never played with functional languages or similar pastimes) - you can’t explain to those people why modifying global variables all over the place in a large program is a bad idea and other things like that. They just nod along skeptically and then somehow keep stumbling into the same kind of mess over and over.

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3. sriram_malhar ◴[17 Nov 24 00:48 UTC] No.42160982[source]▶

>>42159448 (TP) #

The first reason why I really loved SICP is that it is based on Scheme, a language with powerful primitives. I came from a self-taught world of PL/1, Algol, C, then later C++, Java etc. None of them had closures, hygienic macros, anonymous functions, functional programming, call/cc, and of course, "amb", the non-deterministic choice operator. At an even more basic level, SICP taught me that a lot of non-trivial code can be written with just sequences and maps, with good enough efficiency!

Because SICP's starting point was so high, they could describe many concepts easily from the ground up, from object oriented programming, backtracking, constraint programming and non-determinism.

This taught me a number of techniques to apply in real-life, because I could readily identify the missing building blocks in the language or system I was given to work with. For example, I was able to build a lightweight threads system in Java quite readily because I knew that the missing piece was a continuations feature in Java.

See https://github.com/kilim/kilim

4. Buttons840 ◴[17 Nov 24 04:51 UTC] No.42162043[source]▶

>>42159780 #

You kind of defeat your own argument. You say it's important to learn "academic knowledge", but then acknowledge the organization will not value your knowledge.

I do agree with you though.

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5. gonzobonzo ◴[17 Nov 24 05:26 UTC] No.42162184[source]▶

>>42159448 (TP) #

One of the problems I've seen is that when new learners and self-taught individuals ask for advice, a lot of software engineers give recommendations based on what they wish their job was or how they would like to imagine themselves.

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6. lovecg ◴[17 Nov 24 06:06 UTC] No.42162309{3}[source]▶

>>42162043 #

Well in my experience good organizations do recognize that the better design means lower costs in the long run, and people who don’t get that tend to not get promoted. Communicating this effectively up and down the chain is a whole different art in itself though.

7. ericjmorey ◴[17 Nov 24 14:11 UTC] No.42164257[source]▶

>>42162184 #

This is a real problem that people with experience put on learners. If you asked them how they learned it, they'd tell you an entirely different story about starting small, practicing often, trying many ideas, having a strong motivation and some occasional guidance. But they tell others to follow a rigorously defined path which creates the opposite mindset that a learner needs.

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