Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hascheme | Hacker News Reader

What are the pros and cons of CTM as compared to SICP? The latter is very "tight"(like most math texts) for lack of a better word. I find programming (even academical ones) books a bit tiring to read because they don't proceed like typical math texts: very concise explanation -> lemma -> theorem -> proof -> corollary -> very concise elaboration. I get lost if a textbook is not written in that "tight" format. Is CTM close in spirit to SICP? Thanks.

View on HN

SICP explores real, interesting programs: a digital circuit simulator, an automatic differentiator, etc., in a sense it explores mathematics and electrical engineering in parallel to computer science and shows a certain unity between all three disciplines, at the cost of requiring more background to understand everything.

CTM explores a lot more programming language concepts than SICP, but the examples and exercises seem to be focused on illustrating those individual concepts in the simplest way possible. I think CTM is ultimately a more down-to-the earth book - you are likely to have more immediate direct use for the things you learn compared to SICP, but it doesn't give you this very high level perspective that SICP does.

I don't think I fully agree with this. CTM is intended for at least sophomore CS students. SICP was intended for a more general engineering audience. That explains some of the links with EE SICP tries to show, whereas CTM concentrates on programming paradigms---some quite exotic.

It's pretty mathematical. In some respects, it contains more CS formalisms than SICP---but it's not too hardcore.

For example, last chapter defines all the operational semantics of their language.

Mind the authors come from the logic programming community, so the book is quite tight.

You can check out a preprint version free online. (Google suggests http://www.epsa.org/forms/uploadFiles/3B6300000000.filename.... though I can't trivially tell if that's the author's official free version, since the official book site has some https problem Firefox is complaining to me about.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com