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460 points pieterr | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.518s | source
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whobre ◴[] No.42158823[source]
I don’t quite get the cult status of SICP. I read it and it’s a fine beginner programming book, but nothing more.
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jgon ◴[] No.42158885[source]
Just so we're clear, this is a "beginner programming book" that has you create a scheme interpreter, then a register machine simulator, then a compiler out of your interpreter that will then have its compiled code run on the register machine simulator, by the final chapter.

This is probably the part where you'd step up and post a link to your repo with solutions to the exercises to back up your talk, but generally I only see this sort of casual dismissal from people who haven't actually worked through the book.

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1. veqq ◴[] No.42161019[source]
Concrete Abstractions, Schematics of Computation and others from the era (also using Scheme) covered similar ground (and went far further!) SICP is denser and sticks to theory forgoing databases, operating systems and actually implementing scheme in assembly.