[HN Gopher] The Little Learner: A Straight Line to Deep Learning...
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The Little Learner: A Straight Line to Deep Learning (2023)
Author : AlexeyBrin
Score : 197 points
Date : 2026-02-08 14:01 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (mitpress.mit.edu)
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| From 2023,
|
| "Pub date: February 21, 2023"
| clbrmbr wrote:
| Yes should be tagged (2023) imo
| rllearner wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of project based learning like the approach taken
| in this book. But I'm not sure if it's a good idea to introduce
| early stage students to Scheme before Python, or deep learning
| before calculus.
|
| I studied pure math in college, and we were required to take 2
| "Computer Science" classes as part of that program. Mainly
| memorizing textbook algorithms and data structure implementations
| in Java. I hated programming for years after that, until during
| graduate school I came up with a project of my own that
| organically required knowledge of Matlab and later Python. I
| loved programming after that.
|
| I hope books like this can help new students avoid the trough of
| disillusionment that can sometimes happen if you're forced to
| learn a cool subject (like programming) in a very uncool way.
|
| Personally, I would not recommend this book to a young person
| interested in deep learning and programming (based on the table
| of contents). I would probably recommend they first learn
| calculus and use Python to make plots while doing so. Then read
| Fleuret's "The Little Book of Deep Learning" and try to implement
| simple models in PyTorch.
| Onavo wrote:
| This is also pretty good
|
| https://www.sscardapane.it/alice-book/
| prakashrj wrote:
| That's the video of my son to prove that Scheme can be a first
| programming language.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXhsutNKhec
| prakashrj wrote:
| This is how he learned Scheme.
|
| 1. Typing 2. Vim through https://vim-adventures.com/ 3.
| Little Schemer https://a.co/d/0343Ez4v
|
| Don't assume that they would need more things.
| noosphr wrote:
| This is child abuse. What sort of monster uses vim for
| s-expression based languages? Everyone knows Emacs is the
| only sane way to work with them.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| I mostly learned with pen and paper and tracing in my
| mind. We were 18 though
| falcor84 wrote:
| Pen and paper? Excuse me, but _real_ programmers use
| butterflies.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| I suppose butterflies would do for volatile storage but
| you really need long term memory, such as twig and clay
| tablet.
|
| What was good enough for the Sumerian's is good enough
| for me.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| This was just standard procedure at university in 2002.
| Nothing special. It was me and 200 more people. Pretty
| sure all the exercises were lifted or inspired by The
| Little Schemer even thought it took me years to learn
| about that book.
| AlexeyBrin wrote:
| The first programming language one learns is really not
| important, most skills are transferable. Racket is an excellent
| programming language for beginners (this book however is not a
| good book for a complete beginner because it goes really fast
| over the Racket introduction).
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > to introduce early stage students to Scheme before Python, or
| deep learning before calculus.
|
| This book is part of the classic "Little" series of books
| starting with the "Little Schemer" which, despite its name and
| style, is certainly not a _novice beginner_ book.
|
| The later books: "Seasoned Schemer", "Reasoned Schemer", "The
| Little Typer" and "The Little Prover" are all _very advanced_
| books. They share the same style of illustrations and Socratic
| method, but you will absolutely need to work through them
| slowly and careful to get value out of them.
|
| The "Little" books are generally targeted to an audience of
| computer language nerds and pretty much assume you have a solid
| understanding of programming, familiarity with scheme and the
| books come from a time when every serious engineer had basic
| calc knowledge.
|
| These are classics (and I was really impressed with "The Little
| Learner") but are very serious and challenging texts, that
| outside the first book, are aimed at advanced readers (and for
| those readers are true delights).
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I think you're overstating the difficulty of _Seasoned_ and
| _Reasoned_ , both are comfortably undergraduate texts (though
| _Reasoned_ is a challenging text if it 's your first time
| with that style of programming). We used to teach _Seasoned_
| to high school students (advanced high school students, but I
| 'd put them on par with motivated 1st/2nd year college
| students not more advanced than that). I'd agree with the
| other three, though, they are advanced texts.
| noosphr wrote:
| Python has so many ways of doing things it's a distraction,
| doubly so when you add all the special sauce for tensor
| manipulation.
|
| Scheme by comparison has only one way of doing things and gets
| out of your way.
| nxobject wrote:
| > "The Little Book of Deep Learning"
|
| I wouldn't recommend it. My copy is dogeared - but for me as a
| concise mini-reference for a working statistician who has to
| work with data science people, but not actually implement
| anything. It's more of a high-level handwavy "these are the
| concepts involved".
| graemep wrote:
| There are quite a lot of precedents for teaching Scheme as a
| first language.
|
| Java is not a great choice and one I can see would be
| offputting.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > (based on the table of contents)
|
| So your opinion is based on just reading the table of contents?
| I always find it disconcerting when someone writes a multi-
| paragraph commentary on a work they didn't actually read or
| see.
|
| I understand that you're commenting on the approach more than
| the contents, but you're pretty dismissive of it without
| actually reading the details of how they went about things.
|
| You're not quite judging a book by its cover, but you're not
| that far beyond that.
| rllearner wrote:
| > you're pretty dismissive of it without actually reading the
| details of how they went about things...
|
| I wasn't really trying to be dismissive (other than saying
| that I _personally_ would not recommend it to a young person
| interested in programming and deep learning). I was mostly
| trying to start a discussion about the best way to teach
| /learn this subject. I hoped to attract more knowledgeable
| commenters (such as yourself). A day later I still stand by
| my personal opinion that it's probably best to learn the
| mathematics first, and to use the lingua franca of the
| domain.
|
| I'd like to add that, from my perspective, this pseudo-
| critique was a very small part of my comment. I was mostly
| trying to say "It's very important and difficult to keep
| early students' interest. Bravo on the novel approach taken
| in the book. It's much better than what I had as a college
| student." That might not have been clear in my comment.
|
| > You're not quite judging a book by its cover, but you're
| not that far beyond that.
|
| Fair. But there wasn't anything else to read in the
| submission and I was _trying_ to start a curious
| conversation. Despite my good intentions it was a bad
| comment.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| N=1, but I learned scheme first. It was great and I'm doing
| fine. First scheme then C. Back-to-back.
| imtringued wrote:
| Telling people that they need to learn boring prerequisites
| before they are allowed to learn the next thing is exactly how
| you kill motivation. This strategy works if you have a fully
| mapped out curriculum that is planned as a whole and a societal
| expectation that you go through the entire thing, it doesn't
| work for independent learning.
|
| For independent learning, motivation is the key bottleneck and
| your goal is to make people organically motivated in calculus
| after learning that their calculus knowledge is lacking.
| sporkl wrote:
| The framework used in the book, malt[0], is currently not GPU-
| accelerated, but it's being worked on.
|
| Maybe interesting, I used it for a toy implementation of the GPT
| architecture[1] in about 500 lines.
|
| (I studied with one of the authors, Dr. Daniel Friedman; wasn't
| super involved here but proofread a late draft and TA'd for a
| course based off the book.)
|
| [0]: https://github.com/themetaschemer/malt
|
| [1]: https://github.com/sporkl/malt-transformer
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _The Little Learner: A Straight Line to Deep Learning_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810332 - Feb 2023 (96
| comments)
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