#381 overall
6.945 Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming
MIT OpenCourseWare
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2020 · score 1.4
6.945 is Gerald Sussman's graduate-level MIT course on advanced symbolic programming, built around problem sets in which students extend base Scheme environments provided by the instructor and staff. It draws on material related to SICP and is distributed through MIT OpenCourseWare.
Commenters describe it as the modern, graduate-level successor to MIT's Scheme-based introductory course, valued for its demanding problem sets and for changing how they write code.
Programming Languagesadvancedfreeproject-based#scheme#symbolic programming#sicp#sussman#problem sets
Recommendations by year
20062026
If you want the modern, grad-level version of an MIT scheme class, I highly recommend Sussman's 6.945. I don't know if there's an open courseware version but the entire class is centered around psets, each of which starts with a base environment provided by Sussman and the teaching staff, and which you are required to work in / extend. The class itself was extremely entertaining: you watch Sussman walk back and forth between two transparency projectors, switching the slide on each one as he arrives. Yes, you got very good at reading scheme code very quickly while listening to him talk at the same time.
I understand why MIT decided to make the introductory CS classes more accessible -- they wanted to expand the CS department beyond just those who had already had programming experience by the time they got there, I think? It makes a lot of sense and frankly I found the "replacement" classes pretty great, even while I was taking this class at the same time. Instead of going on at length about how much of a shame it is that MIT "got rid of its scheme class", consider 6.945.
This was one of the handful of classes that I felt were worth the price of admission; I've written code differently ever since.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/
I prefer the MIT OpenCourseware style, where there's no signing up, no trying to get money out of you and you can come in and just take what you want out of a course, much of it graduate level classes where knowledge is dumped for it's own sake, whereas Udacity/Edx/Coursera all seem geared to introductory courses and selling credentials. I typically just want the lecture notes, assignments, and the recommended reading now. I find video lectures too clunky to load up in the bulky UIs of MOOCs, bandwidth problems, and they eat up too much screen space for working along writing out the programs. I appreciate the condensed versions in the notes too since I don't have a lot of time to dedicate an hour to watch a lecture I could read much faster.
For example this course on Elliptic Curves http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-783-elliptic-curve... I decided to take after going through djb IETF working group mailing list posts which are so detailed I wanted to understand the basic math involved. Every post he writes is so thorough it's typically almost a class in itself in modern security analysis http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg07335.h...
Also, I originally learned "real development" (my decade of hacking around C willy nilly modifying programs doesn't really count) from Sussman's "Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming" where you read chapters out of SICP and then work on assignments, with mini lectures built into them in just plain text http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...