Lecture 1A: Overview and Introduction to Lisp
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN people recommend the SICP lectures as a deeper, livelier route into the book and a formative course even for seasoned programmers.
What it is
The first lecture of MIT's 6.001 (SICP) with Abelson and Sussman, giving an overview of the course and an introduction to Lisp. It argues that computer science is about managing complexity and abstraction, not computers.
Recommended by 10 HN commenters across 10 different months, 2019 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec floathub · 2020-04 · on “Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?”
Learn LISP/Scheme and lots of fundamental concepts you probably have a feel for, but in a far more profound way: 1. First watch the SICP series ( [this video] ) 2. Then work through the book ( [LINK] ) If you really do the exercises (an hour here and an hour there), you can feel you brain getting wrapped around many core notions in very illuminating ways.
Strong rec k00b · 2020-12 · on “Ask HN: What new programming languages did you learn in 2020?”
The real beauty is in how few operators you need to achieve maximal expressiveness in a programming language. It makes other programming languages seem extra. Highly recommend the SICP lectures [this video]
Strong rec augusto-moura · 2021-03 · on “Not Lisp again (2009)”
The class mentioned in the article was actually made available under Creative Commons by the MIT OpenCourseWare[1], you can see the entirely of the course in Youtube. I watched and cannot recommend it enough, even for seasoned programmers [1]: [this video]
Strong rec wiseleo · 2022-12 · on “24/7 SICP 1986 lectures stream”
It's on-demand on YouTube[1] and an excellent course that is still very much relevant with very high production quality circa 1986. What makes it special is who is teaching it, which is the original authors of SICP. The course thus completely complements their book and is in the same style. The courses from later years are also on YouTube, but they don't feel the same. [1] [this video]
Strong rec lab11 · 2023-01 · on “Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?”
Not even a second of thought: Sussman's & Abelson's SICP [this video] especially the section on streams ( [LINK] ) It changed my outook on programming by pi degrees and I feel it is more needed then ever.
Recommends chrisa · 2019-10 · on “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]”
The original course videos are on youtube too! I found them a bit easier to watch than reading the book: [this video]
Recommends abiro · 2019-12 · on “Ask HN: Which of our ideas about computation could survive a thousand years?”
I’ve included the halting problem, but omitted the Turing machine, because while ingenious, the latter is simply a hack to make proofs work and not a very good way to think about computation. Similarly, I’ve included distributed representations, but omitted backpropagation since while backprop works very well for a number of problems that are otherwise unsolvable today, it is not a particularly enlightening way to write programs. Also, the first 10 minutes of the introductory SICP lecture contains a livelier presentation of the idea in the quote: [this video]
Recommends lymitshn · 2020-03 · on “How I became a better programmer (2017)”
Maybe more of the hype comes from the fact that its a Lisp. To get a feeling for the "magic" of lisp, I would suggest either watching SICP video lecs[0] or reading the book. I started learning lisp, almost the same time I've started learning programming with Java (college). Honestly I was thinking why they don't just teach us that, instead of Java at that time. Also Clojure is created by a fairly respected dude (afaik) Rich Hickey. His talks and Clojure design decision articles on the site are really insightful. Also this talk[1] also pretty good overview of different paradigms and `Clojure way`, imo. [0] [this video] [1] [LINK]