HACKER Q&A
📣 elamje

Is SICP worth the time investment for a Clojurian?


After I joined HN, I pretty much immediately began learning Clojure (via Clojure for the Brave and True) and it was a very enlightening experience. I hyped it (and LISP) up to my coworkers, because of the profound impact it had on my programming mentality. I would say I really internalized functional programming, the power of macros, the simple underlying data structures that allow the same function to operate on nearly all structures without extra code, etc.

I also got SICP, but have only really flipped around to keywords that interested me. I don’t know if SICP is going to be that “aha” moment, of if it’s going to just push me a little harder to internalize these LISP ideas.

I ask this as a pretty efficient person who typically likes using the 80/20 rule to determine if something is time worthy. Is SICP going to be a good use of time, or is more like 80% effort input for 20% more knowledge?


  👤 albertoCaroM Accepted Answer ✓
yes It worths, SICP is a great book!, It's the same you are working with Clojure, Javascript or C++.

Its purpose isn't to teach Scheme or Lisp but it is to teach a bunch of techniques and ideas about the state, programming functional, object-oriented, compiler, and interpreters.

If you read it It will make you a better programmer.