Lecture 1A | MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation, 1986

Why HN readers recommended it

Seen as a classic and often the moment programming 'clicks'; commenters praise Abelson's opening that computer science is not about computers.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

MIT OpenCourseWare

Topic

programming fundamentals

Format

lecture

Level

intro

HN recommenders in dataset

11

HN mentions in dataset

20

Recommendation years in dataset

2012–2024

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Heh that's interesting, I just watched 106A yesterday to get an idea of how the programming introduction course is compared to my university (utwente.nl). I actually was a bit disappointed to see that it is very much like our introduction course, except that this teacher …

• One section of original lectures are freely available via MITs OpenCourseWare youtube channel: [VIDEO] It would be quite difficult to beat these lectures, while they appear a bit dated, the content is great. SICP is a great way to learn about programming, although I am …

• Reminds me of the MIT SICP lecture videos from the 80s. The concepts of black box abstraction and the simplicity of using LISP like lego building blocks blew my mind and made me switch from being a UX designer dabbling in Rails to a full …