Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)
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Cover of the second edition
AuthorHarold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman
SubjectComputer science
GenreTextbook
PublisherMIT Press
Publication date
1984 (1st ed.), 1996 (2nd ed.), 2022 (JavaScript ed.)
Pages657
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LC ClassQA76.6 .A255 1996
Websitemitpress.mit.edu/sicp

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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a computer science textbook by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman. It is known as the "Wizard Book" in hacker culture.[1] It teaches fundamental principles of computer programming, including recursion, abstraction, modularity, and programming language design and implementation.

MIT Press published the first edition in 1984, and the second edition in 1996. It was used as the textbook for MIT's introductory course in computer science from 1984 to 2007. SICP focuses on discovering general patterns for solving specific problems, and building software systems that make use of those patterns.[2]

MIT Press published a JavaScript version of the book in 2022.[3]

Content

The book describes computer science concepts using Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. It also uses a virtual register machine and assembler to implement Lisp interpreters and compilers.

Topics in the books are:

Chapter 1: Building Abstractions with Procedures

  1. The Elements of Programming
  2. Procedures and the Processes They Generate
  3. Formulating Abstractions with Higher-Order Procedures

Chapter 2: Building Abstractions with Data

  1. Introduction to Data Abstraction
  2. Hierarchical Data and the Closure Property
  3. Symbolic Data
  4. Multiple Representations for Abstract Data
  5. Systems with Generic Operations

Chapter 3: Modularity, Objects, and State

  1. Assignment and Local State
  2. The Environment Model of Evaluation
  3. Modeling with Mutable Data
  4. Concurrency: Time Is of the Essence
  5. Streams

Chapter 4: Metalinguistic Abstraction

  1. The Metacircular Evaluator
  2. Variations on a Scheme – Lazy Evaluation
  3. Variations on a Scheme – Nondeterministic Computing
  4. Logic Programming

Chapter 5: Computing with Register Machines

  1. Designing Register Machines
  2. A Register-Machine Simulator
  3. Storage Allocation and Garbage Collection
  4. The Explicit-Control Evaluator
  5. Compilation

Characters

Several humorously-named fictional characters appear in the book:

  • Alyssa P. Hacker, a Lisp hacker
  • Ben Bitdiddle
  • Cy D. Fect, a "reformed C programmer"
  • Eva Lu Ator
  • Lem E. Tweakit
  • Louis Reasoner, a "loose reasoner"

License

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.[4]

Coursework

The book was used as the textbook for MIT's former introductory programming course, 6.001,[5] from fall 1984 through its last semester, in fall 2007.[6] Other schools also made use of the book as a course textbook.[7]

Reception

Byte recommended SICP in 1986 "for professional programmers who are really interested in their profession". The magazine said that the book was not easy to read, but that it would expose experienced programmers to both old and new topics.[8]

A review of SICP as an undergraduate textbook by Philip Wadler noted the weaknesses of the Scheme language as an introductory language for a computer science course.[9] Wadler criticized in particular the lack of pattern matching, obscuring equational reasoning and making the teaching of proofs harder; the lack of algebraic data types in Scheme and the over-reliance on cons pairs for both code and data representation, which can confuse beginning students; and the choice of strict instead of lazy evaluation as the standard evaluation strategy.

Influence

SICP has been influential in computer science education, and several later books have been inspired by its style.

See also

References

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  1. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Raymond, Eric S.; Steele, Guy (1991). The New hacker's dictionary. Internet Archive. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-68069-1.
  2. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Harvey, B (2011), "Why SICP matters?", The 150th anniversary of MIT, Boston Globe.
  3. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: JavaScript Edition. MIT Press. 2022. ISBN 9780262543231.
  4. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."SICP". MIT Press. Archived from the original on 2017-12-26. Retrieved 2007-11-11..
  5. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". OpenCourseWare. MIT. Spring 2005. Retrieved 2020-06-21.
  6. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Guy, Donald, "The End of an Era", MIT Admissions (blog comment), archived from the original on 2018-08-21, retrieved 2008-08-05, I talked to Professor Sussman on the phone... He said that he'd actually been trying to have 6.001 replaced for the last ten years (and I read somewhere that Professor Abelson was behind the move too). Understanding the principles is not essential for an introduction to the subject matter anymore. He sees 6.001 as obsolete.
  7. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Universities and Colleges Using SICP". MIT Press. Archived from the original on 2022-04-23. Retrieved 2022-03-30.
  8. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Kilov, Haim (November 1986). Byte Magazine Volume 11 Number 12: Knowledge Representation. p. 70.
  9. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Wadler, P (1987-03-01). "A critique of Abelson and Sussman or why calculating is better than scheming". ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 22 (3): 83–94. doi:10.1145/24697.24706. ISSN 0362-1340.

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