I finished the second chapter in SICP

Finally …

This chapter was a lot of work, at the end it got a bit too repetitive and just a bit too much to track.

I am comforted by the fact that i do not seem the only one to have this sort of opinion.

Finally i can rest … ¹

Although to be clear, the educational content of this chapter was properly mind-blowing to me, i was just starting a list to enumerate the various concepts gone through but then i stopped because i realized that I’d be listing the table of contents at that point.

There were points where i simply didn’t like the approach taken by the book however (my main gripe is with the put/get function in the data directed programming (sections 2.4 to 2.5), not only was it low-key in-actionable because you couldn’t run the examples to get a better understanding , which resulted in a host of problems like people posting their “solutions” without checking that they worked {SPOILER ALERT, most of them don’t}(as actually writing the code is better than passively reading it), but implementing this entire operations-type table is completely do-able, I’ve done just that!

So i don’t really know why they went and introduced this weird mutable thing that sticks out like a sore thumb and ruins the way you reason about the program …

But either way, the concepts were neat, and if only for providing more concrete feedback on why i thought the material in sections 2.4 and 2.5 was wonderful is that it explains in easy terms how remote things like data dispatch nd type casting can be achieved using rather easy to understand constructs.

I am under no illusion that this is exactly how type coercion works for instance, the same way i am under no illusion that the number used in programming languages are built up using church encoding, but it does explain how they can be achieved using basic components which is the entire point as i understand it.

Anyways, the last exercise doesn’t work, i think I’m not going to spend much time with this any longer as it just isn’t worth the trouble anymore.

Maybe I’ll get back to it way later after i finish the book, but most likely I’ll just skip it and return to it independently sometime in the far future.

I’m just tired of my insistence on doing all of the exercises, hope i get better with this obsessive compulsive behavior.

EDIT : on 2020-01-25 i already started SICP chapter 3 lol.