Date: 2009-03-23 21:08:17 Created: 2009-03-23 16:53:24
Structure and interpretation of computer programs is a book and/or course given at MIT which uses the Lisp dialect Scheme to teach programming and development habits. The book, and videotaped multimedia lectures of its contents by the creators, can be found online and consumed at own leisure.
One very cool aspect of this is that the videos are recorded in 1986. And at that point the course itself and the book had already been out for a few years.
What is wonderful is how modern the development thinking of these guys are.
Or, perhaps more correctly, how long what we may reflexively preceive as modern, perhaps even radical, ideas about software development have been thought and taught.
The course is full of data abstraction, encapsulation, breaking down problems in minuscle pieces, very heavy emphasis on code readability, minimizing duplicate code and so on. All you need to do is slap on some present-day labebls and people would think the course was started yesterday.
In short: to people who looked in the right places, software development methodologies can't have seemed to move very fast in the last 30 years.
They even remember to emphasize the importance of fun in programming.
In short, great stuff if you feel like spending some quality time educating yourself.