SICP: o fim de uma era
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as the canonical explanation from Sussman himself of why SICP ended at MIT.
What it is
A short Portuguese-language excerpt of Gerald Sussman's 2016 NYC Lisp Meetup talk explaining why MIT replaced the Scheme-based 6.001 (SICP) course with Python courses. The full talk is linked in the description.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends yazzku · 2023-02 · on “Sussman Explains the End of SICP”
Don't miss Sussman's talk linked from the post: [this video] This stuff resonates with me deeply. The reality of the modern computing world is a clusterfuck that no single person understands, especially because, like Sussman said, parts are entirely secret/proprietary anyway. Therefore I think an engineer should be skilled in a) removing the unnecessary bits of that clusterfuck that are not necessary to their problem and b) getting stuff done without having a complete understanding of the whole system. (b) sounds scary as fuck, but I think that's the (sad?) reality we live in in the software and hardware world. Embrace the cluster; embrace the fuck.
Recommends OhMeadhbh · 2025-04 · on “Why Fennel?”
Also... HtDP (How to Design Programs) is a good follow-on to SICP. Oh... and I think we can't mention SICP without referencing this (relatively recent) video about why MIT moved from Scheme to Python for intro classes: [this video]
Cites kagevf · 2023-01 · on “Learn Lisp the Hard Way”
My understanding is that the authors of SICP themselves wanted to update the curriculum - not just a language change, but to cover something at a higher level of abstraction. See: [this video]
Cites efortis · 2023-04 · on “Programming Isn’t Coding”
Related, Gerald Jay Sussman explains why they pulled the plug on MIT 6001 (SICP) here: [this video] To me, part of the problem is that devs continuously change tech stacks without poking at the layers underneath. So only a few become proficient enough to focus on the abstractions. Similarly, now many designers are not more than technicians of graphic design tools.
Cites jstx1 · 2023-07 · on “Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?”
Not necessarily as relevant, programming has changed a lot since SICP came out. Sussman says so himself - [this video]
Cites MathMonkeyMan · 2025-03 · on “Tracing the thoughts of a large language model”
In a sense this has been true of conventional programs for a while now. Gerald Sussman discusses the idea when talking about why MIT switched their introductory programming course from Scheme to Python: < [this video] >.