https://corecursive.com/039-hal-abelson-sicp/
"If you pick up almost any computing book it starts out 'here are these datatypes, these operations that you do' and somewhere around 20 or 30% through the book, they show you how to define a function or a procedure. Whereas we really take the opposite approach. We say the key thing is abstraction. So we kind of start there."
"The axe [the book] is grinding is that people write programs to do one particular thing. And then the price of that is that a whole lot of software engineering ends up being trying to get out of the hole you dug yourself into because you made a program that was too specific."
Thanks for the link, I really enjoyed it.
Every time I see Abelson or Sussman's name pop up I pay attention, somehow they always have something sagely to say.
To add to the previous post:
I found it interesting that he suggests that a large part of SICP's legacy comes simply from the fact that MIT represents the absolute cream of the crop and so a lot of very brilliant people went on to speak highly of it.
Another interesting point; if Abelson were to write SICP again he would include a lot more on OOP than the short chapter it has in the book but at the time they didn't really appreciate the power of encapsulating state in that way.
It was surprising to hear one of the pioneers of functional programming say that. It goes to show that the founders of movements are oftentimes less rigid in their thoughts than their followers, indeed, the interviewer astutely brings up that SICP is highly regarded by people who perhaps aren't too fond of OOP. Hal Abelson really, really understands computation, so it shouldn't have shocked me to realise he's not dogmatic.
Would have been nice if they did an interview with Sussman next.
He is a far more interesting person in my opinion.
>>5 til that he was the author of MDL, mit's lisp dialect that was used to write original Zork (i'm sure it was used for all kinds of cool shit, but Zork is what it'll be remembered for). i guess guy was prolific, doing lisp things at MIT for years. i haven't verified that, but a couple of VLSI proceedings that i have from that era seem to indicate that SCHEME-79 might've been the first chip to use computer aided layout (8088 from around the same time was designed and laid out manually on draft paper)