💾 Archived View for tilde.town › ~insom › 2021-05-24.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:23:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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2021-05-24

I think I am ready to give up on ever reading SICP.

It was one of those "well we're spending a lot of time at home" pandemic things that I started with. I also poured a reasonable amount of time into Forth; enough to solve some puzzle-style problems and feel a sense of achievement.

That said, I don't think I actually want to learn Lisp or Forth any further -- at least not with the idea that they will unlock some fundamental understanding of computers.

I still like to play with Racket, but I think that -- because I dropped out of University -- there was always some part of me that has felt inferior and that I had missed out on some fundamentals.

I think for most programmers, including me, you don't need to know these things, especially not their implementation in Scheme.

Things like (delay) were interesting concepts to introduce, but when you realise that's just futures (or Python's await) you can see that in the last few years mainstream languages actually have been catching up with Lisp. Maybe not in such a graceful, homoiconic way, but still in an actually useful way.

I understand anyone reading this and thinking that I have missed "the point" -- SICP is not supposed to be a practical book. That's fine; I know that. But I don't think that even the impractical parts are of interest to me any more.

These mental tools don't help me solve the problems I have, either personally or professionally, with computers. I am slowly realising that I actually want to solve real problems that I have, and not just learn more abstract ways to do the same things.

This lesson has taken basically two decades. Infact, I think I might never have learned it if I hadn't actually climbed up to the point where "the summit" was near, and realised I don't want to go there.