Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)
	Cover of the second edition
Author	Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman
Subject	Computer science
Genre	Textbook
Publisher	MIT Press
Publication date	1984 (1st ed.), 1996 (2nd ed.), 2022 (JavaScript ed.)
Pages	657
ISBN	0-262-51087-1 (2nd ed.)
LC Class	QA76.6 .A255 1996
Website	mitpress.mit.edu/sicp

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a computer science textbook by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman. It is known as the "Wizard Book" in hacker culture.^[1] It teaches fundamental principles of computer programming, including recursion, abstraction, modularity, and programming language design and implementation.

MIT Press published the first edition in 1984, and the second edition in 1996. It was used as the textbook for MIT's introductory course in computer science from 1984 to 2007. SICP focuses on discovering general patterns for solving specific problems, and building software systems that make use of those patterns.^[2]

MIT Press published a JavaScript version of the book in 2022.^[3]

Content

The book describes computer science concepts using Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. It also uses a virtual register machine and assembler to implement Lisp interpreters and compilers.

Topics in the books are:

Chapter 1: Building Abstractions with Procedures

The Elements of Programming
Procedures and the Processes They Generate
Formulating Abstractions with Higher-Order Procedures

Chapter 2: Building Abstractions with Data

Introduction to Data Abstraction
Hierarchical Data and the Closure Property
Symbolic Data
Multiple Representations for Abstract Data
Systems with Generic Operations

Chapter 3: Modularity, Objects, and State

Assignment and Local State
The Environment Model of Evaluation
Modeling with Mutable Data
Concurrency: Time Is of the Essence
Streams

Chapter 4: Metalinguistic Abstraction

The Metacircular Evaluator
Variations on a Scheme – Lazy Evaluation
Variations on a Scheme – Nondeterministic Computing
Logic Programming

Chapter 5: Computing with Register Machines

Designing Register Machines
A Register-Machine Simulator
Storage Allocation and Garbage Collection
The Explicit-Control Evaluator
Compilation

Characters

Several humorously-named fictional characters appear in the book:

Alyssa P. Hacker, a Lisp hacker
Ben Bitdiddle
Cy D. Fect, a "reformed C programmer"
Eva Lu Ator
Lem E. Tweakit
Louis Reasoner, a "loose reasoner"

License

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.^[4]

Coursework

The book was used as the textbook for MIT's former introductory programming course, 6.001,^[5] from fall 1984 through its last semester, in fall 2007.^[6] Other schools also made use of the book as a course textbook.^[7]

Reception

Byte recommended SICP in 1986 "for professional programmers who are really interested in their profession". The magazine said that the book was not easy to read, but that it would expose experienced programmers to both old and new topics.^[8]

A review of SICP as an undergraduate textbook by Philip Wadler noted the weaknesses of the Scheme language as an introductory language for a computer science course.^[9] Wadler criticized in particular the lack of pattern matching, obscuring equational reasoning and making the teaching of proofs harder; the lack of algebraic data types in Scheme and the over-reliance on cons pairs for both code and data representation, which can confuse beginning students; and the choice of strict instead of lazy evaluation as the standard evaluation strategy.

Influence

SICP has been influential in computer science education, and several later books have been inspired by its style.

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (SICM), another book that uses Scheme as an instructional element, by Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom
Software Design for Flexibility, by Chris Hanson and Gerald Jay Sussman
How to Design Programs (HtDP), which intends to be a more accessible book for introductory Computer Science, and to address perceived deficiencies in SICP
Essentials of Programming Languages (EoPL), a book for Programming Languages courses

References

^ Raymond, Eric S.; Steele, Guy (1991). The New hacker's dictionary. Internet Archive. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-68069-1.
^ Harvey, B (2011), "Why SICP matters?", The 150th anniversary of MIT, Boston Globe.
^ Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: JavaScript Edition. MIT Press. 2022. ISBN 9780262543231.
^ "SICP". MIT Press. Archived from the original on 2017-12-26. Retrieved 2007-11-11..
^ "Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". OpenCourseWare. MIT. Spring 2005. Retrieved 2020-06-21.
^ Guy, Donald, "The End of an Era", MIT Admissions (blog comment), archived from the original on 2018-08-21, retrieved 2008-08-05, I talked to Professor Sussman on the phone... He said that he'd actually been trying to have 6.001 replaced for the last ten years (and I read somewhere that Professor Abelson was behind the move too). Understanding the principles is not essential for an introduction to the subject matter anymore. He sees 6.001 as obsolete.
^ "Universities and Colleges Using SICP". MIT Press. Archived from the original on 2022-04-23. Retrieved 2022-03-30.
^ Kilov, Haim (November 1986). Byte Magazine Volume 11 Number 12: Knowledge Representation. p. 70.
^ Wadler, P (1987-03-01). "A critique of Abelson and Sussman or why calculating is better than scheming". SIGPLAN Not. 22 (3): 83–94. doi:10.1145/24697.24706. ISSN 0362-1340.