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Comment on Ask HN: What does a developer need to know to build their own Lisp from scratch?parent

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Calling SICP "not much" must be quite an understatement. The book is 800+ pages (PDF version from Sara Bander). If you really work through all the exercises without checking solutions online, you are probably gonna be busy for a year or so, assuming you still got other things going on in live.

But I agree with recommending it to everyone, who wants to be educated about computer programming and writing beautiful, readable and stable code, as it introduces the reader to many concepts like abstraction barriers/layers and making things more readable by splitting into well named functions and elegant solutions to problems.

Reading part of SICP (the first 40% roughly) and really working on the exercises on my own, without looking up solutions early, was a breaking point in my computer programming self-education, as I learned lots of things, that I did not learn at university, where none such high quality material was used.

I should have split up that sentence I guess. I didn’t actually mean to say sicp is quick (although I’m wouldn’t say a year if you are already a good developer); implementing a scheme is quick to learn and do, however I don’t think you will intuit the elegance from it that way. After (a portion of) sicp, you probably will.

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