@igasparens: In 1986 MIT filmed 20 lectures for a room of Hewlett-Packard engineers. Gerald Sussman walked in wearing a wizard hat. …
Summary
A tweet recounts the famous 1986 MIT lectures by Gerald Sussman and Harold Abelson for Hewlett-Packard engineers, where they taught abstraction and recursion rather than job skills, with Sussman famously wearing a wizard hat.
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In 1986 MIT filmed 20 lectures for a room of Hewlett-Packard engineers. Gerald Sussman walked in wearing a wizard hat. The course rewired how a generation thought about code.
The engineers were not students. They were working professionals sent by their employer to learn a language most of them would never use at work.
Abelson opened by telling them computer science is not a science and is not about computers. He said it was about controlling complexity in systems too large to hold in one head.
They never taught a job skill. They taught abstraction, recursion, and how to build a language when the language you have runs out.
The tapes sat in an MIT archive for years. Then they went online and never left.
People who watched them in 1986 built the tools people used in 2006. People who watch them now say the same thing about the code they write.
Two men, a chalkboard, and a wizard hat, teaching engineers who already had jobs.
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