SICP and Emacs

As you all know by now, I really love SICP and consider it among the best—if not the best—books on computer science of all time. I didn’t read it until fairly late in my career and yet I can’t overstate how much I learned from it and how much it changed the way I think about our craft. There are those—including Abelson and Sussman—who say that the approach employed by SICP is no longer applicable but I disagree vehemently. If you don’t understand its lessons then you don’t understand computer programming no matter how many robots you program.

You won’t really understand those lessons unless you work most of the problems. I mostly skipped over them on my first reading but later went back to reread SICP and work the problems. Again, I learned new things and deepened my understanding of what I thought I already knew.

Getting, finally, to the point, Konstantinos Chousos has just started reading SICP and is working the exercises as he goes along. He has a blog post that describes his workflow for studying the book. His is by no means to only such workflow possible but it’s a good one and worth emulating if you, too, want to become enlightened by SICP.

The TL;DR is that he installed SICP as an Info file so he can read it in Emacs and then installed Racket as his Scheme environment because it offers an SICP extension that recreates the original MIT Scheme that SICP uses. He also installed the emacs-ob-racket package for working with Racket from within Emacs.

He describes in detail how to install all these so it’s pretty easy to duplicate his setup. If you want to study SICP, and you should, Chousos’ workflow is an excellent way of doing so. And, you’ll end up with SICP installed in Emacs as an Info file. What’s not to like?

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