The great programmers of the past, who wrote the fortran numeric libraries, lets say, drew flow-charts for every procedure they are about to write. This gave them the right intuitions and the right feeling about what they do. At the level of expressions you have just (only) recuring 3 patterns - it will be either a sequence, a conditional (branching) or a loop (recursion), so when they begin to write the code, they were never confused – it has to be one of these....
There are already several websites which publish a “roadmap” of how to teach yourself programming (University keve) using freely available courses and textbooks. Here is my 2 cents. First of all, SICP is an advanced textbook. It is by no means suited for teaching freshmans, unless you are a MIT student, who is math-lover and a “slow thinker”. Brian Harvey, the great, managed to teach the CS61A at Berkeley – a SICP-based course which goes at a slow pace....
Some hard problems will never be solved by “brainstorms” (more like bullshit-storms) or any about of babbling by Chuds. They require the trained minds like of C.A.R. Hoare or Leslie Lamport. or Philip Wadler or Martin Odersky – the outliers and top performers.. Ideally, they have to be mathematically mature, and preferably on the compiler side (so they also understand important implementation aspects). The “direction” is actually clear and well-understood (a small miracle), and it is in restricting too general concepts and formalisms with additional constraints (so they actually match the environmental constraints), or just typing....
Lets talk about some targets no one else sees. I am a prod student of Brian Harvey, the great. I used to watch his CS61A recordings like other people watch stupid TV serials. For me it was something like watching X-Files or Twin-Peaks, which are only non-stupid ones. The problem was, however, that even if I understand every word and almost every concept mentioned, I didn’t know which are the most fundamental ones and which are just accidental notions or just preserved in a shared culture social constructions....
Google deprecated external access to its IMAP due to “security reasons” Karpathy posted a classy coding video lecture in which programming has been done entirely from the default Mac OS browser (doing everything in a web-interface to a Jupiter notebook). Corporations want us to stay in their (and only their) browsers all the time (in many different tabs) and never leave, so they can collect all the data they want....
What could even be in common between Haskell and Rust? Well, they are the most advanced languages of its time, the most controversial and the most discussed. Most importantly - both languages are have a proper type-classes/traits based standard libraries, where the type-classes/traits define major modern mathematical notions, which can be traced to the modern set-theoretic math and related notions. This is what makes the actual difference with other crap like PHP....
There are a few ancient sayings about going around the world, looking for the Truth (which us Out There, you know) and then returning back home only to find It right there. Other ancient thinkers have suggested to look no further than onto your own self (to find all the answers). And, of course, the ultimate resit is I Am That from the Upanishads. There are some manifestations Truths I found going around the world....
There is only one true way (the proper way) to program. Just as there is only one “reality”, one “truth” (which correctly describes What Is) and The Right Way (of the Buddha, which means being firmly grounded in What Is). Imagine, if you will, that you are writing a program for yourself which will trade your own life savings on some “exchange”. Not for other people, not other people’s money. You for yourself....
I finally found a well-written no-bullshit book about CS. It says, among other things: There is no need to define a representation of the values False and True in terms of values of some other type. Conceptually, values of type Bool are simply (denoted by) the expressions False and True. Of course, the computer’s internal representation of Bool and all other data is in terms of bits, but we don’t need to know any of the details of how that works to write programs....
A small disclaimer: I’ve lived in India for a few years, I have some good friends there and I think I begin to really understand the some cultural aspects which govern this vastly complex and spontaneous society. Nowadays everyone, it seems, is either a programmer or an AI researcher or both. When they are not a crapto “engineers”, of course. Just like chef Gusteau from the Ratatouille movie famously proclaimed – “Anyone can cook”....