←back to thread

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

(simondobson.org)
466 points pieterr | 1 comments | 16 Nov 24 17:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.286s | source
Show context
__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.

replies(23): >>42159154 #>>42159177 #>>42159448 #>>42159469 #>>42159581 #>>42159600 #>>42160025 #>>42160394 #>>42160515 #>>42160581 #>>42160656 #>>42161150 #>>42161980 #>>42162797 #>>42163285 #>>42163324 #>>42163910 #>>42164082 #>>42164391 #>>42164509 #>>42164766 #>>42165157 #>>42169617 #
tkiolp4 ◴[16 Nov 24 21:19 UTC] No.42159448[source]▶
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.
replies(3): >>42159780 #>>42160982 #>>42162184 #
1. sriram_malhar ◴[17 Nov 24 00:48 UTC] No.42160982[source]▶
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