Nerd Wisdom

This set of videos, of Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson teaching their course on the “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, is one of the treasures of the internet. The clothes are out of style, but the material presented is still completely relevant.

The SICP web-site has lots of useful additional information, including the complete text of the 2nd edition of their classic textbook.

I am not going to try to write a better review of the Abelon’s and Sussman’s textbook than the Amazon review written by Peter Norvig. Norvig is the head of Research at Google, and a co-author of Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach, the leading AI textbook.

But I will add one comment: what I love most about these lectures is the point (see the picture above of Sussman in his wizard hat) that a computer programmer is like a wizard–he creates something real out of ideas. Computers let us be wizards; and I believe we have only scratched the surface of the possible “spells” that we can learn to cast.

If you want a nice implementation of Scheme, the beautiful dialect of Lisp that was invented by Sussman with his student Guy Steele, and used in this textbook, I highly recommend DrScheme.

Tags: DrScheme, Gerald Jay Sussman, Hal Abelson, Scheme, SICP, video lectures

This entry was posted on August 17, 2007 at 12:23 am and is filed under Algorithms, Books, Computer Science, Education, Programming, Reviews, Science, Technology, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.