←back to thread

Code from MIT's 1986 SICP video lectures

(github.com)
160 points felipap | 2 comments | 17 Oct 25 20:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.408s | source
1. matheusmoreira ◴[21 Oct 25 06:22 UTC] No.45653007[source]▶
There's also this interesting study about the difficulty and time requirement of SICP's exercises:

https://lockywolf.wordpress.com/2021/02/08/solving-sicp/

The math stuff is brutal.

replies(1): >>45661349 #
2. Jtsummers ◴[21 Oct 25 20:35 UTC] No.45661349[source]▶
Take that writeup with a massive grain of salt. The author claims they spent 459 minutes on exercise 1.1, that exercise is this:

> Exercise 1.1: Below is a sequence of expressions. What is the result printed by the interpreter in response to each expression? Assume that the sequence is to be evaluated in the order in which it is presented.

There are then 12 simple expressions to evaluate. That is, it took them nearly 40 minutes for each expression.

Exercise 2.46 took them 535 minutes to implement. It wasn't even complex math, they needed to create a 2d-vector data type (their choice on implementation details) with a constructor, accessors, addition, subtraction, and scaling. That should not have taken 9 hours to complete (not by that point in the book at least).