Interactive SICP

Learning and science

interactive textbook

SHOW HN2012

280points
51comments
#45of 1,677 in 2012
Top 3%of 2012 by points

How HN took it

DebatedReal support and real criticism

6 positive, 10 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 6 critical, out of 24 comments about the project. Thread score 0.00.

Idea: 3 for, 1 againstExecution: 1 for, 2 againstDesign: 0 for, 2 againstDocs: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Great initiative, interactive format is useful for learning

    From 4 comments
    • A great initiative. I hope you manage to finish it. I hope people extend the same treatment to non-lisp canonical texts.
      shelf on HN
    • Good initiative. I wish it was done in clojure/clojurescript, would have been great. But still its a nice way to learn. One suggestion. Add paredit mode to balance the parens.…
      firesofmay on HN
    • If I ever get up to Scheme, I'm adding this to my chart of interactive resources for learning programming.
      arikrak on HN
    • Very nice! I sent this to Abelson and Sussman and they both loved it. I know the idea of an "intelligent book" has long been a dream of theirs. If you find yourself in Boston,…
      keithwinstein on HN

Objections

  • SICP is too advanced for amateurs

    From 1 comment
    • SICP is an advanced text, and using it to teach amateurs how to program is, probably, a mistake. Brian Harvey have done a great job to simplify and make it more…
      dschiptsov on HN
  • Green navigation bar is hard to find or read

    From 2 comments
    • uhh, It's got some sort of green bar, but it's stuck waaay over to my right and I can't read it. Chrome OSX
      Tyr42 on HN
    • "Green Bar" on the right: It is the navigation menu that comes into focus once you click on it. You can focus on the content w/o getting distracted by the ToC. :) To OP. Don't…
      Surio on HN
  • Autograder rejects valid answers to exercise 1.2

    From 2 comments
    • Looks awesome. I think exercise 1.2 is broken. I enter in: (/ (+ 5 (+ 4 (- 2 (- 3 (+ 6 (/ 4 5)))))) (* 3 (* (- 6 2) (- 2 7)))) and it tells me the result is wrong, but wolfram…
      BlackJack on HN
    • I came up with the same solution and had the same wrong result.
      vhf on HN

Requests

  • Help from contributors to finish the remaining chapters

    From 2 comments
    • Hello everyone, OP here. This is my first Show HN post. I guess most of you should know what SICP is. I took a class where it was used as a textbook (only the first 3 chapters,…
      zodiac on HN
    • Sorry for repeating myself, but I really need contributors for this - I can't finish it just working on my own on weekends.
      zodiac on HN
  • Add paredit mode for balancing parentheses

    From 1 comment
    • Good initiative. I wish it was done in clojure/clojurescript, would have been great. But still its a nice way to learn. One suggestion. Add paredit mode to balance the parens.…
      firesofmay on HN
  • Offline support via cache manifest

    From 1 comment
    • The site doesn't seem to need a server to function - so it would be awesome if you could add a cache manifest to make it available offline:…
      sudhirj on HN

Questions

  • How to show footnotes

    From 1 comment
    • Anyone have ideas for how best to show footnotes? The current version doesn't have them.
      zodiac on HN

Alternatives named

  • Picture language prototype by rquintas

    From 1 comment
    • Great job, over the past week i have been doing an interactive implementation of SICP picture language, and have a working prototype to play around, check it out here:…
      rquintas on HN
  • HtDP and Racket teaching materials

    From 2 comments
    • SICP is an advanced text, and using it to teach amateurs how to program is, probably, a mistake. Brian Harvey have done a great job to simplify and make it more…
      dschiptsov on HN
    • I've done some of the picture exercises from Concrete Abstractions. They were quite fun but significantly harder than assignments which didn't tax my spatial perception skills. I…
      zodiac on HN
  • NUS interactive SICP in JavaScript

    From 1 comment
    • Yeah, I do agree that the simplicity of scheme helps. It really is a good teaching language. That said, courses are starting to adapt SICP to different languages (MIT and UCB use…
      zodiac on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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