Everything Is Just Functions: 1 week with David Beazley and SICP

I agree. Being self contained helps make it timeless. In contrast are books with a CD in the back with an outdated Java compiler you will never be able to setup. And then you have to migrate the snippets yourself.

If you study any other related field like math or physics you become accustomed to learning a formal system for the context of a particular problem.

CS students tend to have this weird careerist view where every page just directly help them get a job.

Most undergrad CS students want a practical/engineering curriculum. They are not really there for theory, but for a long time that's how CS departments operated, unless maybe you were at an engineering school.

Schools are so desperate to keep up enrollment numbers today that many have capitulated and are giving students what they want instead of what the faculty thinks they need.

> Most undergrad CS students want a practical/engineering curriculum.

If all someone wants is the practical benefits of programming and has no interest in the underlying theory, they shouldn't waste their their time and money on a CS degree. All the practical information is available for free or at very low cost.

You are comparing mathematicians to programmers.

A more fair comparison is engineering or applied math major, not pure math at MIT.

But, a lot of employers demand a degree.

The same applies to CS, so you're missing something else -- skilled tutors and the campus experience.

There is a big difference between being practically minded and the allergy to learning anything which doesn’t translate to resume keywords. SICP will teach you more about JavaScript, python, etc than most anything.

> They are not really there for theory

Is that why they are so bad at adapting to foreign languages and frameworks? Maybe they should go back to the basics.

Maybe so, but we shouldn't be doubling down on expensive and time consuming degrees in the name of ill-conceived credentialism. That hurts everyone except the universities profiting off of it.

At least in the U.S., many students are paying upwards of a $100k for a four-year degree. That better be one hell of a "campus experience" and some next-level "skilled tutors".

Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think there's a better way out there.

How does that mean anything to the people who need to be employed to continue living? We're not the ones with the ability to change this.

I dont think so. SICP isn’t abstract algebra, it’s just unlikely to be the exact syntax you will use at your job.

Engineers rarely do laplace transforms by hand either.

The book is written for 1st year stem undergrads at MIT. So maybe 2nd or 3rd year at state school.

> Most undergrad CS students want a practical/engineering curriculum.

Somewhat understandable considering that student loans put you into indentured servitude unless you have rich parents. Although I still think they're shortsighted. A good CS graduate should understand that programming languages are just syntactic sugar over the underlying concepts and have little trouble translating/picking up the basics of new languages.

How about an AI-tutor? Actual professors don't have time to adapt their teaching to every indfividual studen's knowledge background. But AI might.

Universities should start their own AI-tutor development programs, in co-operation with others because, only way AI-tutors can become better is by practice practive practice.

So I'n not sure if this is a new viewpoint or not, but it is not only students that need training, it is also teachers who need to be trained more in teaching. AI is all about "training", understanding is about training. Training is the new paradigm for me.