A smug dismissal

From the peanut gallery

The fields lie fallow

What is a haiku?

I'm not sure this qualifies

Maybe

Can you explain what you mean by this?

I'm interpreting it like: this book is acting more important than it is, you turned a single page, and then closed the tab because you thought it wasn't worth reading.

I also wasn't very impressed with it, but that could be because I already can code and this book focuses more on beginners than SICP. SICP starts off easy and gets hard fast...at least to me. I could've definitely missed some things in HTDP though as I didn't work it through from A-Z as I should have.

If you read other lispy books around the SICP era, they describe the issue with it: it's for math-loving engineering students. There were a few books that tried to focus on problem solving with computers without having to talk about irrational numbers.

HtDP does this very well. It helps structuring the information and the functions around it so you can solve your questions cleanly. Compared to most programming books around that are either too tied to a language or too focus on known algorithms I found it quite great.

That makes sense

Spot on! Also, the suggestion of human language as a program, even across cultures, and therefore humans as computers and a viable platform for programming, runs largely in the face of the tradition from which this tome comes. The expression of a possibly ill-conceived program, written for purpose, then thrown away, nominally as a means to program others, at a minimum achieves communication .. not with the computer but with humans. Multicontextual shift there, but same philosophical plane. It's sort of an art project. You know, curiosity. The thing that got us all in to this computational mess. Why grow up? It's the weekend after all, and there are dimensions of programming far more exciting than optimizing analytical formality. :)