Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Read Free Page A

emphasize
the principles of engineering design. He led us in starting out on
this enterprise and wrote the first set of subject notes from which
this book evolved.
    Much of the style and aesthetics of programming that we try to teach
were developed in conjunction with Guy Lewis Steele Jr., who
collaborated with Gerald Jay Sussman in the initial development of the
Scheme language. In addition, David Turner, Peter Henderson, Dan
Friedman, David Wise, and Will Clinger have taught us many of the
techniques of the functional programming community that appear in this
book.
    Joel Moses taught us about structuring large systems. His experience
with the Macsyma system for symbolic computation provided the insight
that one should avoid complexities of control and concentrate on
organizing the data to reflect the real structure of the world being
modeled.
    Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert formed many of our attitudes about
programming and its place in our intellectual lives. To them we owe
the understanding that computation provides a means of expression for
exploring ideas that would otherwise be too complex to deal with
precisely. They emphasize that a student's ability to write and
modify programs provides a powerful medium in which exploring becomes
a natural activity.
    We also strongly agree with Alan Perlis that programming is lots of
fun and we had better be careful to support the joy of programming.
Part of this joy derives from observing great masters at work. We are
fortunate to have been apprentice programmers at the feet of Bill
Gosper and Richard Greenblatt.
    It is difficult to identify all the people who have contributed to the
development of our curriculum. We thank all the lecturers, recitation
instructors, and tutors who have worked with us over the past fifteen
years and put in many extra hours on our subject, especially Bill
Siebert, Albert Meyer, Joe Stoy, Randy Davis, Louis Braida, Eric
Grimson, Rod Brooks, Lynn Stein, and Peter Szolovits.
We would like to specially acknowledge the outstanding teaching
contributions of Franklyn Turbak, now at Wellesley; his work
in undergraduate instruction set a standard that we can
all aspire to.
We are grateful to Jerry Saltzer and Jim Miller for
helping us grapple with the mysteries of concurrency, and to
Peter Szolovits and David McAllester for their contributions
to the exposition of nondeterministic evaluation in chapter 4.
    Many people have put in significant effort presenting this material at
other universities. Some of the people we have worked closely with
are Jacob Katzenelson at the Technion, Hardy Mayer at the University
of California at Irvine, Joe Stoy at Oxford, Elisha Sacks at Purdue,
and Jan Komorowski at the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology. We are exceptionally proud of our colleagues who have
received major teaching awards for their adaptations of this subject
at other universities, including Kenneth Yip at Yale, Brian Harvey at
the University of California at Berkeley, and Dan Huttenlocher at
Cornell.
    Al Moyé arranged for us to teach this material to engineers at
Hewlett-Packard, and for the production of videotapes of these
lectures.
We would like to thank the talented instructors – in
particular Jim Miller, Bill Siebert, and Mike Eisenberg – who have
designed continuing education courses incorporating these tapes and
taught them at universities and industry all over the world.
    Many educators in other countries have put in significant
work translating the first edition.
Michel Briand, Pierre Chamard, and André Pic produced a French edition;
Susanne Daniels-Herold produced a German
edition; and Fumio Motoyoshi produced a Japanese edition.
We do not know who produced the Chinese edition,
but we consider it an honor to have been selected as the
subject of an “unauthorized” translation.
    It is hard to enumerate all the people who have made technical
contributions to the development of the Scheme systems we use for
instructional purposes.