00:30 Computer science is a terrible name. First, it's not a science. And it's also not about computers. 3:12 People in the future will recognize that people were really formalizing intuitions about *process* -- how to do things. Talking precisely about *how to* knowledge. As opposed to geometry that talks about what is true. 5:36 What's a process? A process is like a magical spirit that lives in the computer and does something. What directs a process is a pattern of rules called a procedure. Procedures are the spells. The programming language is the language for casting the spells. 7:25 Computer science is the business is in formalizing the "how to" imperative knowledge. 10:12 As opposed to the constraints in other kinds of engineering, where the constraints of what you can build are the constraints of physical systems, the constraints imposed in building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds. 10:55 Abstraction. Engineering technique whereby a "black box" can be used without knowing its implementation details. And these "black boxes" can be combined to create even more complex systems. 16:50 We're not only building boxes that input and output numbers. We're building boxes that can compute methods. We can have procedures whose values is another procedure. 18:14 Big Topic 1: Black-Box Abstraction 22:45 Big Topic 2: Conventional Interfaces 24:45 Big Topic 3: Metalinguistic Abstraction - making new languages 28:07 Learning a new language. Know: 1) primitive elements 2) means of combination and 3) means of abstraction. 29:58 Lisp's primitive data 38:45 Lisp's "define" 44:48 Lambda is Lisp's way of saying "make a procedure". 49:33 A key thing in Lisp is that you don't make arbitrary distinctions between things that happen to be primitive in the language and things that happen to be built in. So the things you construct get used with all the power and flexibility as if they were primitives. 51:13 How to make a case analysis i.e.conditionals. "cond" or "if" 59:05 An example problem: Heron's square root algorithm 1:08:54 Summary
These guys at MIT did something really amazing by writing the mind blowing book SICP! I wonder why isn't it the textbook for all introductory CS courses all over the world. Forming the minds of the students with it would certainly result in way much better software engineering practices. Many thanks for sharing these great videos!
Even MIT lost the plot / jumped the shark... Switched to Java (Blecchhhh) then Python (Mehhh)... they didn't value what they had. Best CS course and book ever IMO. ...and I've seen a *lot*.
I like how Mr. Abelson opens the lecture and talks about how computer science is not a science. That little smile on his face is priceless, probably expecting students to be mindblown from the first minute.
And it's NOT about computer... Bothe negations are important... You focus too much on the science word... But the ESSENCE was not to confuse the tool with the art... So it's more important to remember that it is NOT about computers. Science doesn't really mean anything precisely anyway. While the word computer does.
@@ko-Daegu Computer science is inherently mathematical, and far more abstract than the modern idea of the digital computer. CS is considered a "formal science," meaning we use formal (axiomatic) systems to generate knowledge. At a higher level, CS is about computation, and not computers. Digital computers are just one implementation of one model of computing, and a tool in some cases. The computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said that "computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do."
I really liked the "philosophical" points he raises. In the lectures I have attended, the essence of computer science was never explored in this way, yet it seems to me to be of paramount importance for actually understanding what computer science is and what its point is. This lecture withstood the test of time and rightfully so.
There is a before and after this course. You will never think the same. The software engineers can be divided in the the ones that saw this, and the ones who didn't. No words to describe the enlightening experience.
Because nowadays 99% of the "coder crowd" is filled with posers, which think it's "easy" because they read it, so it's obvious, and so I can act like a king to other people "just" using technology as consumers... While at that time, they were pioneers, they actually had to use their brain to find undiscovered stuff, and no consumer to "bright in society" outside, so they were humble true geniuses. Real working brains... Nowadays we have parrots, trying to have a social status, and being proud to get money and fame with minimum effort, and an ego where even Caesar would be short compared to theirs.
Lisp syntax is a bit different since "syntactic sugars" have been added over the years. Yet the content of the lecture does not vary over time since it is "not about computers" but process and procedures. Thank you, MIT.
Whereas with most courses like this, you spend about half of your time learning the programming language and half of your time learning the processes, the beauty of this course is that it spends about 5% of the time learning the language and 95% learning the processes.
that wizard splash screen and music is 1337. it makes me excited because when you see and hear that you KNOW something that old (and still around) is super relevant. it's the heart and core. the essence of the machine. aaah, I can smell the wooden desks, pencil sharpeners/shavings, and eraser rubbings.....
Why, of course it is. Perhaps you won't be interested in learning Lisp for programming purposes (granted, there are more efficient and simpler languages nowadays), but this course (and the homonymous book, of course) is not aimed towards beginners in programming, instead, is useful for programmers who really want to learn how their field works on a theoretical level. And this happens to be the single best course out there for that purpose.
@@EngineersLife-Vlog It's timeless. People in the museum of computer science will use that as a quality stick reference for how things started. It's THAT good.
What fantastic work. Taking a course like this as your introduction to programming and computer science could really ignite a passion for the topic. Abelson and Sussman have a deep understanding of computation and can present it in an easy to understand but challenging and idea-dense manner. Love this stuff. And, most importantly, I love that it's shared for free to anyone with an Internet connection.
Makes me wish some legendary courses in history (1960s or earlier) could have been videotaped. Obviously, technology wasn't there, but it's cool to get a glimpse back into history so far back.
Excellent lecture! He managed to successfully capture the most important basics of what computer science is *really* about in a beautifully concise and clear way. Well done.
It seems like 30 years ago they knew more about the "essence" of computing than we do now. I mean, should not all modern programming languages be a progression of LISP? Be homoiconic? Instead we have Java ... That said, check out Julia if you havent already, It's my absolute favorite lang at the time! And thanks to MIT for this lecture which is a gift to humanity
I found his style as good as it gets. He introduced the subject with it's roots in history (and caught me) and began to demonstrate what it was not. No judgements or put downs. The audience was obviously aware that they were in on the ground floor of something big. I have very little knowledge of mathematics but found him easy to understand. Good stuff
Isn't it about time MIT went back and encoding these videos in HD? They've been on the net for years and I can understand why they were first uploaded in 240p, however this is 2013 and watching such superb material in Blur-o-vision is inexcusable!
Yeah, because MIT can just "Zoom! Enhance!" a 360p video to 1080p quality. Although TV shows and movies make you think you can, that is not how technology works. You can make high-res material low-res, but not the inverse. To get HD videos of this course they would have to reshoot the whole thing, and they do not even use SICP anymore.
***** I know you think you're being clever Kyle, but you've hilariously gotten the wrong end of the stick in your frantic rush to post a smug comment. What I meant was, surely the original videos still exist (from which they were digitized in the first place) and they could digitize them again at a higher resolution and bitrate. Do you really think the original tapes are of the same quality as you see here on RUclips?
ajz2k Wow does anyone even know what I'm talking about here? I'm not suggesting that this was ever filmed in super HD, but you can bet your ass that the video quality was good enough to be able to view it on a 22" screen. Try watching this video in full screen mode. It has quite clearly lost a substantial amount of definition and clarity by being poorly encoded. I don't blame them, because these videos were first uploaded to the internet back in the day when dialup was more commonplace than broadband. What I'm saying is that they probably still have the originals and they could theoretically go back and encode them at 1080p so that at least we could watch them full screen.
WinterXL Holy crap here's another one who doesn't have the foggiest. Keep 'em coming! I will say this one more time. This video was encoded from the original video cassettes. At the time of encoding, which was years ago, a very low resolution was used, presumably because not many people had fast download speeds back then. The original tapes would have been watchable on a full size TV. Try watching this video full screen and tell me that's how the original looked at that size. Don't be stupid. I am suggesting that the video is re-encoded FROM THE ORIGINAL TAPES at a resolution more in line with today's internet. I don't have to "magic detail into existence," because the detail is already there, on the original video tapes. Using more pixels would capture more of that detail. How freaking hard is this to understand?
WinterXL I can't believe you're this incapable of following basic reasoning. You're so hilariously wrong it's painful. I will explain this to you again, very carefully. If you still don't understand it then I suggest you go back all the way to Sesame Street and start your education again. 1) This was a professional video production filmed for Hewlett Packard employees in a studio. You can tell this from the camera work and the fact that it is a studio setup (look how low the walls are). It was NOT done with "home equipment." The original tapes will have been very good quality as far as VHS is concerned. In other words, you could have watched them on a full size TV screen with no clarity issues. Blow this RUclips video up to full screen and tell me that's what the original tapes would have looked like. This video is incredibly pixellated, because it was encoded from the original tapes at a very low resolution. 2) I never said it was uploaded in the 80's. My point was that these videos have been online for a long time, since at least the early 2000's if I recall. Back at that time, broadband connections were comparatively rare and dialup was the norm. This is why videos uploaded at that time were uploaded at a low resolution, nowhere near the quality which is commonplace now. These videos were uploaded at low quality, which is evident from the level of pixelization when you watch them at anything other than a very small size. When I first watched these videos years ago, I did so on a iPod mini screen. That's about the only size that you'll see them at the same sharpness to the original tapes, i.e. tiny. That tells you everything you need to know about the level of detail which has been lost in the encoding. Seriously dude, I cannot believe you're watching the seminal course on computer science with such atrocious comprehension skills. How did you even get through one video?
@@pastafarian3758 The old school choosed the logical approach instead of statistical approach of AI. So Lisp is good for them, but not for us (we use statistics). Lisp is a good language, simple yet insightful, but certainly not for today's AI.
This is not the 6.001 given to undergraduates. I actually took 6.001 fall semester of '86 and it was given in 10-250 which is a giant auditorium, not this tiny classroom. There were about 200 students in the real 6.001. I don't even know who these people could be, because 001 wasn't offered to graduate students. (Although, the lecture itself is the same one we got as undergraduates -- it was all about managing complexity).
+Ron Williams You are correct. The videos are not of MIT students but are the videos that go with the textbook. "These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television. .... Note: These lectures follow the first edition (1985) of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs." See the course on MIT OpenCourseWare for more details at ocw.mit.edu/6-001S05.
@@mitocw If these are professionally produced then perhaps the originals are high quality and there is a better resolution and quality possible for the online version?
That's "professionally produced" for NTSC television standards using analog video tape (not film or then then-unreliable digital video formats) as the recording media. The masters would be on tape that's had more than 30 years to degrade.
Great lecture. He introduces some motivation ( calculate sqrt(x)) to start the lecture along with some history about it. Then he defines some elements or applies primitive elements to perform some procedures in LISP. I loved the lecture.
I like it this lecture has nearly a million views. In a way it's sort of a form of Justice because at the time this lecture was given this professor thought he had traded Fame for a career in knowledge but now he has actually gotten more famous than many celebrities who traded substantial careers for frivolous recognition. But with this lecture being put online that inequity has been addressed or at least has the possibility to be addressed. Good for this professor.
It explains in the description of the playlist: "These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television."
Holy crap, I actually took this class in 1986, and it's a freshman level class (first course in comp sci for comp sci majors). But this looks like the one done for graduate students who wanted an introduction to programming. The undergrad 6.001 was in one of the big lecture halls (room 10-250). This lecturer though was (maybe still is) one of the top people in computer science in the world, and here he is teaching freshman introductory stuff.
This is one of the rare classes that you can take for your major freshman year. I remember there being a lot more than EECS majors taking it. I believe you had to take either 6.001 or 2.10 (FORTRAN) as a requirement.
Read it the year it came out. Right after completing the in depth study of John Allen's Anatomy of LISP published 7 years earlier. A complete conceptual/practical account of the Age of Significance from bit twiddlying to denotational semantics. SICP was standing on the shoulder of the giants that gone before them at MIT
After 5 years of professional software development experience, I am discovering that I don't know anything! Functional programming is not easy, it definitely brain storms you & creates new ideas.
You can see how 1990's 2000's plug in play programming ideas arose for the concepts of black boxes described here back when people were still writing code linearly.
Online courses from places like MIT are so interesting because while there is no chance I could have gotten into MIT via their testing admission standards I find that I have no trouble at all with their online courses. In fact they often seem sort of basic to me. I'm not sure what that says about the perceived value of an MIT education versus the reality but when they started putting these things online it certainly changed my opinion about the value or the smarts necessary to go through higher education top tier schools like Harvard and MIT.
I tried following along and entering the Lisp into a slime-repl I had running, and not all of the commands shared in the video will evaluate properly, because it appears that Lisp syntax (at least between what is in this video and Common Lisp) has changed since the video was made. An internet search helped me modify the commands in the video to what works in Common Lisp, and helped solidify the concepts for me further.
Very interesting course despite the fact that the lectures took place in 1986. Maybe it is because the main ideas in computer science did not change much despite all the brand new tools such as Java, C#, Ruby, etc. For me this course reignited the interest in functional programming. After watching the first several lectures I definitely want to take a look at some of the modern functional languages. It is just a whole new mindset for looking at solving problems/implementing things
that class uses the book The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and it is available online for those who wants to get full benefit by watching this and reviewing the book
@@qualifiedawesomeness9968 We don't need no, education... Tadadan tada tada tadadan... We don't don't need no thought control... Tadadan tada tada tadadan.... No dark sarcasms in the classroom.... HEY ! TEACHERS ! Leave the kids alone...
It's unlikely, since this was a summer version of the course being given to HP employees. There's another person in these videos taking the course who looks a lot like Mike Saylor did at that time.
The first 10 minutes should be taught to people. The problem why people mix up computer science with computers is because of the name , and some other mix up coding with computer science is because people take computer science degrees and goes into software development where they code
There's only one thing to do when you see an hour long lecture on the structure and interpretation of computer science on RUclips. Crack open a brewski and get your nerd on.
The subject is interesting enough, there's no need for it to be souped up by some performance malarky. This lecturer is as good as it gets. I think he is very good actually! If you transcribe what he says on to paper, you could come up with a very good book.
@BryceHunterTV He's actually the most interested guy in the whole group - judging from the number of questions he makes during the course of these videos.
@CMAenergy - 'the learned' ... lol! This is a Uni lecturer, they don't need to be like a teacher who teaches kids. If anyone in the class is too bored to pay attention then all the better to weed them out of such a priveleged system.
If one wanted to actually improve the quality of these videos - its possible to get someone who works with Non Linear Editor / video production work to remove artifacts of VHS/pixels, apply noise reduction and sharpening etc on these digital videos, then project on large cinema and capture using a 4k camera of the cinema image. Also possible is to ask universities to get some cheap 4k go sports cameras to capture new footage of these excellent professors & assistants at work for future generations. Great work.
@Alex1993x - You don't have to be a nerd to be interested in this stuff and we too have hobbies like the rest. SJ Gould was mad about baseball, for example.
@VideoDocR Are you kdding? This course will still be useful in 100 years from now. Just like the laws of geometry that were discovered by the ancient greeks more then 2000 years ago are still useful. This course is not about a specific programming language or technology. it's about (some of) the basic priciples of computer science. BTW. The Lisp dialect used in this course is called Scheme. DrScheme is probably the easiest to use scheme implementation.
+xXxBladeStormxXx The power of lisp is that it is very limited in structure which means it is easy to learn to operate. And this means you can actually get to learn the fundamentals of computational methods. Java is so wide and complex for learners it means they send all of their time trying to get their head around how to use the language and this distracts from the real fundamentals.
bighands69 Well said. Don't know why I wrote that comment back then but since that time I have certainly come to appreciate lisp more. Let's just say I was young and stupid and 2 months later(lol) I have matured and now understand how silly my post was. Not to mention Lisp was called the Maxwell's equations of computer science.
00:30 Computer science is a terrible name. First, it's not a science. And it's also not about computers.
3:12 People in the future will recognize that people were really formalizing intuitions about *process* -- how to do things. Talking precisely about *how to* knowledge. As opposed to geometry that talks about what is true.
5:36 What's a process? A process is like a magical spirit that lives in the computer and does something. What directs a process is a pattern of rules called a procedure. Procedures are the spells. The programming language is the language for casting the spells.
7:25 Computer science is the business is in formalizing the "how to" imperative knowledge.
10:12 As opposed to the constraints in other kinds of engineering, where the constraints of what you can build are the constraints of physical systems, the constraints imposed in building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds.
10:55 Abstraction. Engineering technique whereby a "black box" can be used without knowing its implementation details. And these "black boxes" can be combined to create even more complex systems.
16:50 We're not only building boxes that input and output numbers. We're building boxes that can compute methods. We can have procedures whose values is another procedure.
18:14 Big Topic 1: Black-Box Abstraction
22:45 Big Topic 2: Conventional Interfaces
24:45 Big Topic 3: Metalinguistic Abstraction - making new languages
28:07 Learning a new language. Know: 1) primitive elements 2) means of combination and 3) means of abstraction.
29:58 Lisp's primitive data
38:45 Lisp's "define"
44:48 Lambda is Lisp's way of saying "make a procedure".
49:33 A key thing in Lisp is that you don't make arbitrary distinctions between things that happen to be primitive in the language and things that happen to be built in. So the things you construct get used with all the power and flexibility as if they were primitives.
51:13 How to make a case analysis i.e.conditionals. "cond" or "if"
59:05 An example problem: Heron's square root algorithm
1:08:54 Summary
So, what is CS then?
Engineering, an art, a craft.
magic
Mathematics, bro...
you're not a science
WOW! A teacher who actually has a well-planned lesson. This professor is amazing.
It is impossible to value or price such a collection of lectures. Thanks to whoever decided to make it available to everyone
These guys at MIT did something really amazing by writing the mind blowing book SICP! I wonder why isn't it the textbook for all introductory CS courses all over the world. Forming the minds of the students with it would certainly result in way much better software engineering practices. Many thanks for sharing these great videos!
Even MIT lost the plot / jumped the shark... Switched to Java (Blecchhhh) then Python (Mehhh)... they didn't value what they had.
Best CS course and book ever IMO.
...and I've seen a *lot*.
I like how Mr. Abelson opens the lecture and talks about how computer science is not a science. That little smile on his face is priceless, probably expecting students to be mindblown from the first minute.
And it's NOT about computer... Bothe negations are important... You focus too much on the science word... But the ESSENCE was not to confuse the tool with the art... So it's more important to remember that it is NOT about computers. Science doesn't really mean anything precisely anyway. While the word computer does.
@@garryiglesias4074 would you mind elaborating a bit more on how it's not about computers
We were, (I was in an earlier version of this class)
@@ko-Daegu Computer science is inherently mathematical, and far more abstract than the modern idea of the digital computer. CS is considered a "formal science," meaning we use formal (axiomatic) systems to generate knowledge. At a higher level, CS is about computation, and not computers. Digital computers are just one implementation of one model of computing, and a tool in some cases.
The computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said that "computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do."
I really liked the "philosophical" points he raises. In the lectures I have attended, the essence of computer science was never explored in this way, yet it seems to me to be of paramount importance for actually understanding what computer science is and what its point is. This lecture withstood the test of time and rightfully so.
I'm coming back to it again after many years and it's still a great series.
There is a before and after this course. You will never think the same. The software engineers can be divided in the the ones that saw this, and the ones who didn't. No words to describe the enlightening experience.
i like these older vids better than the new ones. this teacher's enthusiasm is contagious! :) he is genuinely "into" it!
Because nowadays 99% of the "coder crowd" is filled with posers, which think it's "easy" because they read it, so it's obvious, and so I can act like a king to other people "just" using technology as consumers...
While at that time, they were pioneers, they actually had to use their brain to find undiscovered stuff, and no consumer to "bright in society" outside, so they were humble true geniuses. Real working brains...
Nowadays we have parrots, trying to have a social status, and being proud to get money and fame with minimum effort, and an ego where even Caesar would be short compared to theirs.
@@garryiglesias4074 I agree with all you said. Anyone who clones a git repo and changes a couple of lines thinks they’re a “programmer”
😂🤦
@@unlokia And they stack over flaws... ;)
Lisp syntax is a bit different since "syntactic sugars" have been added over the years. Yet the content of the lecture does not vary over time since it is "not about computers" but process and procedures. Thank you, MIT.
Scheme is A Lisp dialect.
Scheme feels familiar
Whereas with most courses like this, you spend about half of your time learning the programming language and half of your time learning the processes, the beauty of this course is that it spends about 5% of the time learning the language and 95% learning the processes.
that wizard splash screen and music is 1337. it makes me excited because when you see and hear that you KNOW something that old (and still around) is super relevant. it's the heart and core. the essence of the machine. aaah, I can smell the wooden desks, pencil sharpeners/shavings, and eraser rubbings.....
In what way is it LEET?? Please explain.
is this course valuable for us now 2017
Why, of course it is. Perhaps you won't be interested in learning Lisp for programming purposes (granted, there are more efficient and simpler languages nowadays), but this course (and the homonymous book, of course) is not aimed towards beginners in programming, instead, is useful for programmers who really want to learn how their field works on a theoretical level. And this happens to be the single best course out there for that purpose.
@@EngineersLife-Vlog It's timeless. People in the museum of computer science will use that as a quality stick reference for how things started. It's THAT good.
@@EngineersLife-Vlog If your assumption is that knowledge is as versatile than fashion, you're lost.
i have no words to explain How much informative and educational these video are it's just awesome
Yep, just this part where he says software design is only constrained by our own minds made me sit up and think about it...
What fantastic work. Taking a course like this as your introduction to programming and computer science could really ignite a passion for the topic. Abelson and Sussman have a deep understanding of computation and can present it in an easy to understand but challenging and idea-dense manner. Love this stuff. And, most importantly, I love that it's shared for free to anyone with an Internet connection.
Nice quote: "These recursive computations allow u to have the power to go on until the computation becomes true."
Wonder if he planned to be watched around 30 years later on the internet.
+tubeincompetence This is what I am thinking. If yes, he will be very proud of that, which is a amazing thing.
Makes me wish some legendary courses in history (1960s or earlier) could have been videotaped. Obviously, technology wasn't there, but it's cool to get a glimpse back into history so far back.
Naw，he was planning on it being watched on the network in hundreds of years in 1970, not 1986, at the latest.
Yeah, it's sad that cameras weren't yet invented in the '60s.
Hello world!))
Excellent lecture! He managed to successfully capture the most important basics of what computer science is *really* about in a beautifully concise and clear way. Well done.
And here we are, almost 40 years later.
It seems like 30 years ago they knew more about the "essence" of computing than we do now.
I mean, should not all modern programming languages be a progression of LISP? Be homoiconic? Instead we have Java ...
That said, check out Julia if you havent already, It's my absolute favorite lang at the time!
And thanks to MIT for this lecture which is a gift to humanity
Check out Rust as well if you haven't already.
@@DojoOfSom I have, it‘s absolutely amazing within its league
1. Make a guess.
2. Improve the guess.
3. Keep improving the guess until it's good enough.
science BTFO its all trial n error and recording what works!
I found his style as good as it gets. He introduced the subject with it's roots in history (and caught me) and began to demonstrate what it was not. No judgements or put downs. The audience was obviously aware that they were in on the ground floor of something big. I have very little knowledge of mathematics but found him easy to understand. Good stuff
Isn't it about time MIT went back and encoding these videos in HD? They've been on the net for years and I can understand why they were first uploaded in 240p, however this is 2013 and watching such superb material in Blur-o-vision is inexcusable!
Yeah, because MIT can just "Zoom! Enhance!" a 360p video to 1080p quality. Although TV shows and movies make you think you can, that is not how technology works. You can make high-res material low-res, but not the inverse. To get HD videos of this course they would have to reshoot the whole thing, and they do not even use SICP anymore.
***** I know you think you're being clever Kyle, but you've hilariously gotten the wrong end of the stick in your frantic rush to post a smug comment. What I meant was, surely the original videos still exist (from which they were digitized in the first place) and they could digitize them again at a higher resolution and bitrate. Do you really think the original tapes are of the same quality as you see here on RUclips?
ajz2k Wow does anyone even know what I'm talking about here? I'm not suggesting that this was ever filmed in super HD, but you can bet your ass that the video quality was good enough to be able to view it on a 22" screen. Try watching this video in full screen mode. It has quite clearly lost a substantial amount of definition and clarity by being poorly encoded. I don't blame them, because these videos were first uploaded to the internet back in the day when dialup was more commonplace than broadband. What I'm saying is that they probably still have the originals and they could theoretically go back and encode them at 1080p so that at least we could watch them full screen.
WinterXL Holy crap here's another one who doesn't have the foggiest. Keep 'em coming! I will say this one more time. This video was encoded from the original video cassettes. At the time of encoding, which was years ago, a very low resolution was used, presumably because not many people had fast download speeds back then. The original tapes would have been watchable on a full size TV. Try watching this video full screen and tell me that's how the original looked at that size. Don't be stupid. I am suggesting that the video is re-encoded FROM THE ORIGINAL TAPES at a resolution more in line with today's internet. I don't have to "magic detail into existence," because the detail is already there, on the original video tapes. Using more pixels would capture more of that detail. How freaking hard is this to understand?
WinterXL I can't believe you're this incapable of following basic reasoning. You're so hilariously wrong it's painful. I will explain this to you again, very carefully. If you still don't understand it then I suggest you go back all the way to Sesame Street and start your education again.
1) This was a professional video production filmed for Hewlett Packard employees in a studio. You can tell this from the camera work and the fact that it is a studio setup (look how low the walls are). It was NOT done with "home equipment." The original tapes will have been very good quality as far as VHS is concerned. In other words, you could have watched them on a full size TV screen with no clarity issues. Blow this RUclips video up to full screen and tell me that's what the original tapes would have looked like. This video is incredibly pixellated, because it was encoded from the original tapes at a very low resolution.
2) I never said it was uploaded in the 80's. My point was that these videos have been online for a long time, since at least the early 2000's if I recall. Back at that time, broadband connections were comparatively rare and dialup was the norm. This is why videos uploaded at that time were uploaded at a low resolution, nowhere near the quality which is commonplace now. These videos were uploaded at low quality, which is evident from the level of pixelization when you watch them at anything other than a very small size. When I first watched these videos years ago, I did so on a iPod mini screen. That's about the only size that you'll see them at the same sharpness to the original tapes, i.e. tiny. That tells you everything you need to know about the level of detail which has been lost in the encoding.
Seriously dude, I cannot believe you're watching the seminal course on computer science with such atrocious comprehension skills. How did you even get through one video?
this is one of my fav lectures ever .. thanks for the videos
I know it’s sorta nerdy, but this set of videos is my “comfort playlist), even when I get way outta my depth. 😊
And now compare to those fancy tutorials... watching Hal's lecture is so much better then all those hipster ninjas talking science in hd
Truly spoken, sir!
@@miriamb.3857 They speak fast but say next to nothing quite often.
One lecture and I finally understand how lisp is good for artificial intelligence research.
How? Please ,enlighten me.
@@pastafarian3758 The old school choosed the logical approach instead of statistical approach of AI. So Lisp is good for them, but not for us (we use statistics).
Lisp is a good language, simple yet insightful, but certainly not for today's AI.
This is not the 6.001 given to undergraduates. I actually took 6.001 fall semester of '86 and it was given in 10-250 which is a giant auditorium, not this tiny classroom. There were about 200 students in the real 6.001. I don't even know who these people could be, because 001 wasn't offered to graduate students. (Although, the lecture itself is the same one we got as undergraduates -- it was all about managing complexity).
+Ron Williams You are correct. The videos are not of MIT students but are the videos that go with the textbook. "These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television. .... Note: These lectures follow the first edition (1985) of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs." See the course on MIT OpenCourseWare for more details at ocw.mit.edu/6-001S05.
No way! I took .001 that same semester!
@@mitocw If these are professionally produced then perhaps the originals are high quality and there is a better resolution and quality possible for the online version?
That's "professionally produced" for NTSC television standards using analog video tape (not film or then then-unreliable digital video formats) as the recording media. The masters would be on tape that's had more than 30 years to degrade.
@@mitocw I wish there were companies today that commissioned this kind of high quality courses for their employees!
This is a very rich video. I have had many lectures, and this guy really knows how to teach.
wtf
where are the anime girls?
one of the all time greatest books on CS. EVER.
Great lecture. He introduces some motivation ( calculate sqrt(x)) to start the lecture along with some history about it. Then he defines some elements or applies primitive elements to perform some procedures in LISP. I loved the lecture.
I like it this lecture has nearly a million views. In a way it's sort of a form of Justice because at the time this lecture was given this professor thought he had traded Fame for a career in knowledge but now he has actually gotten more famous than many celebrities who traded substantial careers for frivolous recognition. But with this lecture being put online that inequity has been addressed or at least has the possibility to be addressed. Good for this professor.
Hands down the best lecture I've seen in years!
If you’re lucky enough to find this lecture in 2022, you’ll be pleased to know the textbook SICP has a JavaScript version now
It explains in the description of the playlist: "These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television."
Holy crap, I actually took this class in 1986, and it's a freshman level class (first course in comp sci for comp sci majors). But this looks like the one done for graduate students who wanted an introduction to programming. The undergrad 6.001 was in one of the big lecture halls (room 10-250). This lecturer though was (maybe still is) one of the top people in computer science in the world, and here he is teaching freshman introductory stuff.
This is one of the rare classes that you can take for your major freshman year. I remember there being a lot more than EECS majors taking it. I believe you had to take either 6.001 or 2.10 (FORTRAN) as a requirement.
I achieved satori within the first minute.
Have you read your SICP today?
Read it the year it came out. Right after completing the in depth study of John Allen's Anatomy of LISP published 7 years earlier. A complete conceptual/practical account of the Age of Significance from bit twiddlying to denotational semantics. SICP was standing on the shoulder of the giants that gone before them at MIT
What a privilege to have this on the net. Thank you very much indeed.
i really love how mit does this just to help people that cant have a decent education in their schools, i might as well sub this someday :)
I'm amazed how a 1 hour lecture is equivalent to a week in my school.
Guess you don't get what you pay for cause I didn't pay for this.
Great news! Understanding these fundamental big ideas will serve you well in further courses.
12:56 using black-box abstraction to suppress details for building bigger boxes.
After 5 years of professional software development experience, I am discovering that I don't know anything! Functional programming is not easy, it definitely brain storms you & creates new ideas.
Old but GOLD
ありますね
You can see how 1990's 2000's plug in play programming ideas arose for the concepts of black boxes described here back when people were still writing code linearly.
Online courses from places like MIT are so interesting because while there is no chance I could have gotten into MIT via their testing admission standards I find that I have no trouble at all with their online courses. In fact they often seem sort of basic to me. I'm not sure what that says about the perceived value of an MIT education versus the reality but when they started putting these things online it certainly changed my opinion about the value or the smarts necessary to go through higher education top tier schools like Harvard and MIT.
Thanks to MIT and Mr.Abelson!
Mistake @ 1:05:22: (average 1.5 (/ 2 1.5)) would evaluate to 1.41667
I tried following along and entering the Lisp into a slime-repl I had running, and not all of the commands shared in the video will evaluate properly, because it appears that Lisp syntax (at least between what is in this video and Common Lisp) has changed since the video was made. An internet search helped me modify the commands in the video to what works in Common Lisp, and helped solidify the concepts for me further.
It *seems* MIT/GNU Scheme uses the same (or similar) syntax as the lisp in the video.
Very interesting course despite the fact that the lectures took place in 1986. Maybe it is because the main ideas in computer science did not change much despite all the brand new tools such as Java, C#, Ruby, etc. For me this course reignited the interest in functional programming. After watching the first several lectures I definitely want to take a look at some of the modern functional languages. It is just a whole new mindset for looking at solving problems/implementing things
It's older than me LOL, but still timeless :)
It's older than me even by 2 times and is still being watched. An eternal thing indeed.
The music is 'Jésus que ma joie demeure' by JS Bach.
that class uses the book The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and it is available online for those who wants to get full benefit by watching this and reviewing the book
RUclips/MIT: Thanks. Other Colleges: Screw you, I'm not going 80k in debt. I'll get an education on youtube and not subscribe to the system.
Are you educated now?
@@qualifiedawesomeness9968 We don't need no, education... Tadadan tada tada tadadan... We don't don't need no thought control... Tadadan tada tada tadadan.... No dark sarcasms in the classroom....
HEY ! TEACHERS ! Leave the kids alone...
@@garryiglesias4074 are you ok
@@qualifiedawesomeness9968 Seems better than you: at least I am educated.
@@garryiglesias4074 that's a fair point
Funny, it takes a video from 1986 to let me finally understand what a lambda expression in C# is.
Nice! MIT is the only university offering free educational resources. My hats off to you
"A magical language called Lisp". :-)
must have been so awesome to be an undergraduate with him.
Watching this video i realized, that i need in some low-level programming course. BTW, thanx to MIT for such a gift.
This is the good shit, kinda wished I had found this years earlier
Thanks, MIT. This is a great computer science lecture!
The book is still widely used, I have it in a course I'm taking now on functional programming!
HAVE YOUR READ YOUR SICP TODAY?
@1984thoughtcriminal
The intro piece is "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", Bach
Actually, when I saw the title, I was hoping it was SICP. And when he said lisp, I almost shout « YES! » in the local library (free wi-fi :-°)
MIT LEET!
opencourseware is one of the best things ever!
Many of the things he talks about are so easy and straightforward in practice.. so much theory just makes my head spin
7:00 - Is that Ted Ts'o in the background? He was in MIT at around 1986, so I guess that might be indeed him.
Sure does look like him. Just googled him, WOW :O
It's unlikely, since this was a summer version of the course being given to HP employees. There's another person in these videos taking the course who looks a lot like Mike Saylor did at that time.
watching this in quarantine
Normally I hate school, but this is fun to watch!
The first 10 minutes should be taught to people. The problem why people mix up computer science with computers is because of the name , and some other mix up coding with computer science is because people take computer science degrees and goes into software development where they code
thanks a lot MIT, you guys rock!
There's only one thing to do when you see an hour long lecture on the structure and interpretation of computer science on RUclips. Crack open a brewski and get your nerd on.
[3:00] Behold, another student has mastered the art of "sleeping with your eyes open"
So... you mean to say that we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells?
I almost got lost there when he started making the analogy regarding magicians and sorcerers.
dude's name is sussman 💀💀💀
Wait till you meet Edward Poggers
The subject is interesting enough, there's no need for it to be souped up by some performance malarky. This lecturer is as good as it gets. I think he is very good actually! If you transcribe what he says on to paper, you could come up with a very good book.
2:43 He's Vulcan!! No wonder he is a genius.
@BryceHunterTV He's actually the most interested guy in the whole group - judging from the number of questions he makes during the course of these videos.
sick flow on this prof
@CMAenergy - 'the learned' ... lol! This is a Uni lecturer, they don't need to be like a teacher who teaches kids. If anyone in the class is too bored to pay attention then all the better to weed them out of such a priveleged system.
THANK DOG ITS BACK
First lecture: 894,000 views
Second lecture: 97,000 views
:(
ｆｕｃｋｉｎｇｎｏｒｍｉｅｓ!
Great lecture
Wow, 1986! Talk about old school!
Most of those kids are probably very rich right now. MIT... damn
If one wanted to actually improve the quality of these videos - its possible to get someone who works with Non Linear Editor / video production work to remove artifacts of VHS/pixels, apply noise reduction and sharpening etc on these digital videos, then project on large cinema and capture using a 4k camera of the cinema image. Also possible is to ask universities to get some cheap 4k go sports cameras to capture new footage of these excellent professors & assistants at work for future generations. Great work.
@Alex1993x - You don't have to be a nerd to be interested in this stuff and we too have hobbies like the rest. SJ Gould was mad about baseball, for example.
The year I was born
*crack*
*sip*
memories flooding in from studies in 2005.. time flies!!! :-) SICP rules!
@VideoDocR Are you kdding? This course will still be useful in 100 years from now. Just like the laws of geometry that were discovered by the ancient greeks more then 2000 years ago are still useful. This course is not about a specific programming language or technology. it's about (some of) the basic priciples of computer science.
BTW. The Lisp dialect used in this course is called Scheme. DrScheme is probably the easiest to use scheme implementation.
They should call it GLOVE. MITs are pretty basic and simple. Gloves are what you want for superior dexterity
has the terminology changed over time? for example is what Harold calls a "combination" an older word for the current term "expression"?
I like The Great Courses Videos more.
I thought this guy was having a weird tick every few seconds until I realized he was checking his notes xD
Very good lecture.
What does "Plato's concept of 3" mean? Anyone knows anything?
OMG! Fedor Emelianenko teaching!
Computer Science is Systems Design.
I am glad we don't have to use something like Lisp nowadays.
xXxBladeStormxXx Some people still do by choice. I've been learning ClojureScript for instance.
+xXxBladeStormxXx
The power of lisp is that it is very limited in structure which means it is easy to learn to operate.
And this means you can actually get to learn the fundamentals of computational methods.
Java is so wide and complex for learners it means they send all of their time trying to get their head around how to use the language and this distracts from the real fundamentals.
bighands69 Well said. Don't know why I wrote that comment back then but since that time I have certainly come to appreciate lisp more.
Let's just say I was young and stupid and 2 months later(lol) I have matured and now understand how silly my post was.
Not to mention Lisp was called the Maxwell's equations of computer science.
+xXxBladeStormxXx
May the force be with you.
This is great