Second, SICP contains problems that are just plain busy work. Exercise 1.14 is a good example of this. I really don't want to draw on paper a huge tree which represents the process generated by evaluating a procedure.
When I was a freshman in college I attempted to test out of first-year physics so that I could get on with the second-year classes. I went into a private meeting with the professor who was grading the tests.
"Well," said the professor, "you made some pretty silly mistakes here, and here, and here. But I recognize the problem: you don't draw diagrams. Here, for example, you made a silly mistake on this ladder-against-the-wall problem because you didn't draw the balance-of-forces diagram."
I admitted that this was the case.
"You were a really strong high school physics student," said the prof, "so you probably got used to being able to glance at problems and intuitively figure out the answer in your head. But the procedure is important. You have to draw these diagrams, and you have to make them correct. You will soon learn to draw them very quickly, but you must learn to draw them, because there are harder problems than the ones you did in high school, and you will find that you can't always hold everything in your head."
And so I did.
I thought fondly of that professor a couple years ago when I first saw the infamous airplane-on-a-conveyor-belt problem. I didn't find it that hard to solve. I was taught by a master.
When I was a freshman in college I attempted to test out of first-year physics so that I could get on with the second-year classes. I went into a private meeting with the professor who was grading the tests.
"Well," said the professor, "you made some pretty silly mistakes here, and here, and here. But I recognize the problem: you don't draw diagrams. Here, for example, you made a silly mistake on this ladder-against-the-wall problem because you didn't draw the balance-of-forces diagram."
I admitted that this was the case.
"You were a really strong high school physics student," said the prof, "so you probably got used to being able to glance at problems and intuitively figure out the answer in your head. But the procedure is important. You have to draw these diagrams, and you have to make them correct. You will soon learn to draw them very quickly, but you must learn to draw them, because there are harder problems than the ones you did in high school, and you will find that you can't always hold everything in your head."
And so I did.
I thought fondly of that professor a couple years ago when I first saw the infamous airplane-on-a-conveyor-belt problem. I didn't find it that hard to solve. I was taught by a master.