Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

"One interesting anecdote is that MIT no longer uses this book to teach its introduction to computer science . They’ve switched to Python instead of Scheme, which is the language taught in this book. The reasoning behind this is that the world doesn’t need more computer scientists; it needs some, but, by and large, what it needs is engineers who know how to use programming languages and achieve a goal, rather than thinking about the atomic constituents of computer science. But this book is very useful for somebody like me, with experience in high-level engineering languages, like VBA, PHP and R. They’re incredibly useful languages, but ones that computer scientists generally disdain, because they’re not theoretically pure or beautiful. This book shows you how languages can be constructed. The most valuable thing it gives you is confidence and knowledge to go and create your own programming language. You get a very good understanding of some of the trade-offs that you have to make when designing languages. For example R does a lot of things that are very unusual among programming languages, and some of them could be considered mistakes, but a lot of them exist because R is trying to achieve a particular objective, and was thus designed following specific and sensible constraints. Another similar and also interesting book is Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming , which explains all the models of computer languages and how they fit together. But it’s even more complex than Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs , so I’d stick with that choice for somebody getting started. I would not describe Scheme as a useful language. It comes back to the question of why you should use one programming language over another. You should not make that decision based on the technical merits of each language, but instead based on the community of people who use it and are trying to solve problems like yours. The community of people using Scheme today is small, and somewhat esoteric, but there are interesting ideas to be learned in the language anyway. And it was very influential in the design of R. R itself is a hybrid of S, a language designed in the 1970s from a pure statistics standpoint, and Scheme; so I learned it to satisfy my curiosity about why the creators of R thought that Scheme was so great. Finally, Scheme is a functional programming language, rather than an object-oriented one; and functional programming is currently experiencing a resurgence of interest."