Re:SICP taught by Abelson and Sussman [video]
by hardwaresofton on Thursday April 10, 2014 @02:27AM
(#7564477)
I think it's the simplicity.
Towards the end, when they start building the machine simulator lisp, you get a very natural transition to machine-level thinking -- they build up to it with simple constructs, just like everything else in lisp, and I think that's beautiful. You can clearly see how you could wire up some buffers and wire up an ALU, and wire up some circuits and end up with a completely generic calculating computer.
The bottom-up approach a lot of classes take is somewhat more burdensome to pull together and hold in your head
Towards the end, when they start building the machine simulator lisp, you get a very natural transition to machine-level thinking -- they build up to it with simple constructs, just like everything else in lisp, and I think that's beautiful. You can clearly see how you could wire up some buffers and wire up an ALU, and wire up some circuits and end up with a completely generic calculating computer.
The bottom-up approach a lot of classes take is somewhat more burdensome to pull together and hold in your head