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I love John Baez's writing but have not read any set of his posts as a whole. Are there threads that develop through time and build on one another? I wouldn't say that I felt enlightened by SICP, but I was and still am excited about what it covers. A couple aspects of it that excite me, recursion and homoiconicity, the property of a programming language whose programs look like a data structure in the language, are, in my mind, related to many other topics that I had encountered before SICP such as (in no particular order): paradoxes such as chicken and egg problem, self-replication, feedback mechanisms, quines, fractals, philosophic inquiry into ontology and consciousness, the anthropic principle, Russel's paradox, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the halting problem and Universal Turing machines, and the list goes on. I initially included Douglas Hofstadter's strange loop in the list, but I think he would say that all of these are tied together by the concept of strange loops. For awhile, I was disappointed with Sussman's answer to why people feel enlightened by SICP. I think I was hoping that he'd fill me in on the secret or give me some clues. I felt like I /almost/ knew why people felt enlightened by it, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. I think what I was really hoping for was an explanation of why SICP and all of these related topics are so exciting to me or that he'd share similar awe or experience and add another piece to the puzzle. Currently, I find a lot of meaning in his statement, "it tells a good story", whether it's the meaning he intended to express or not. The topics excite me because I find relations between them. Finding relations between them is a story that I have created, and it's exciting because the story is far-reaching, and I don't know what character might join the web of relations next...it could seemingly be anything! I think many people feel empowered and enlightened by SICP as a stand-alone entity because the meta-circular evaluator pulls back the curtain on some of the magic behind programming and computing. The exercises show how computers can touch a wide range of topics and can both be molded to how a mind sees fit be and mold the mind in return. Instead of being given a labyrinth of a language created by someone else to learn in an intro to programming course and having to spend a lot of time learning all the syntax, types, tools, etc, Sussman uses a very simple Scheme and shows how to create from scratch a plethora of things encountered in other languages that are useful across many domains in a very flexible way. After accomplishing so much, the reader even creates the magical thing they were given in the beginning, eval. In our world of computing, doing that without much difficulty is empowering and enlightening. |