SICP Feb 22-meeting minutiae

[mario romero]

We had an meta-meeting today, no excersises or solutions were
discussed but the following issues came up for your considerations and
opinions.


-inimo has volunteered to set up a wiki to start documenting the
solutions covered by the group. The ones from previous section will be
taken from past meetings logs.

-inimo appreciates suggestions on what wiki engine to use. Appropriate
code syntax highlighting being of primary concern for obvious reasons.
Current considerations include mediawiki and dokuwili

-A proposal was made to start dividing problems of the upcoming
sections (starting from 2.1) to different members of the group, and
having each one post their solution to the wiki, to be reviewed and
approved by everyone else at meeting-time. The purpose of this is also
to have a more organized meetings, where one "presenter" gives their
solution, and everyone else reviews it and ask questions.


Please answer back with opinions or questions on the previous points.

[Aran Donohue]

On the division of problems:

 - The benefit of an exercise is in its doing, not in seeing the solution
 - The exercises at the end of section 2 are cumulative and not conducive to being split up

Aran

[inimino]

Aran Donohue wrote:
> On the division of problems:
>
> - The benefit of an exercise is in its doing, not in seeing the solution

Absolutely.

> - The exercises at the end of section 2 are cumulative and not conducive to
> being split up
>
> Aran

This was my initial thought too, but AIUI the proposal isn't that
only one person does the problems, but just that when we review the
solutions, whoever "owns" that problem would show the solution and
explain it to the group.

-inimino

--
http://inimino.org/~inimino/blog/

[Mario Romero]

I concur with inimino and Aran on the benefit of doing all the exercises. It's also better for the presenter if the group has also answered his "assigned" problem as alternate solutions or mistakes can be pointed out.

To be more specific on the proposal, If the group is up for it, I suggest we try it for section 2.1. and see how it goes.

[Nicolás Canevali]

I like the idea of a wiki so we can all post our solutions, review others' and do a bit of discussion at any moment, instead of sharing all of our progress over two weeks in two hours over IRC. I believe it'd be a more efficient way to go through the book together.
Then we could focus on actually discussing the exercises at the meetings, polishing the concepts, experimenting beyond what's written in the book.
As for the proposal of dividing the problems, I don't think it will be necessary. Once we have set up the wiki, probably most of the discussion (particularly, the "easy" questions, e.g. why the Pascal triangle procedure takes such arguments, why iterating f(x)=(x+n/x)/2 does not converge to the square root of n, etc., i.e. explanations and comments on the problems or the text) will move there, and will be available full time for anyone to access. The bi-weekly meetings would be useful to concentrate the rest of the discussion that shouldn't be made on the wiki, like proposing optimization techniques for a certain algorithm, asking about Scheme syntax, or why one solution (found in the wiki) is better or different than other, to give a couple of examples. We could assume that everyone that is at the meeting has already done each of the assigned exercises, and checked with and posted his solutions on the wiki.