6 ms·
Not Lisp again....
- sanj 18y agoSummary: tail recursion FTW! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_recursion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_recursion
- sketerpot 18y agoThis belongs in the summary: {higher-order functions, closures, potentially-inefficient elegance} FTW.
- brlewis 18y agoI loved this same course (spring '87 for me), but I wasn't impressed with the speed. I came away thinking Scheme was for fun and C was for practical programming. I've come around since then, and I don't have any performance concerns about my Scheme-based web site.
- antiismist 18y agoWhat is your scheme-based website? Is it ourdoings or something else? Just curious because there aren't a lot of them out there that I know of.
- brlewis 18y agoOurDoings is it. I still use the "wishful thinking" programming methodology I learned from SICP. I'm married with 3 kids and a separate day job, and don't think I could have pulled this off using a less programmable programming language.
- antiismist 18y agoThat's cool. Could I interview you about developing web apps using Scheme? I'm working on a blog post / interview on the topic w/ all the people I know who do Scheme web development. Anyway if you are interested I'd love to hear from you, my email is: idoh@idoh.com
- rlm 18y agoThis is the essence of that "This is so cool"-feeling that arises when you first really _get_ programming. And almost makes me want to invest in SICP or something similar to see what all this LISP-talk is about :)
- lliiffee 18y agoRead the full text online right now: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html If you meant an investment of time, then, well yes. But SICP is really, really fun.
- chrisconley 18y agoDon't forget about our Hacker News SICP Book Club too: http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-news-reads-sicp http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-news-reads-sicp
- rlm 18y agoI both meant an investment of time and money :) I don't like reading entire books on the computer. It just feels better on paper ;)
- xenophanes 18y agoI agree about paper books. Does anyone who feels the same have a kindle? Supposedly the screen is more like paper. Wondering how well that works...
- jrockway 18y agoIt is very much like paper. (The display area is smaller than the average hard-cover book, however, but that doesn't bother me too much.) The only thing I don't like about the Kindle is that you can't skim to get an overview of the book or newspaper... you basically have to use the table of contents or read it in order. Not so bad for books, kind of annoying for local news. (The killer feature of the Kindle, though, is the effortless buying feature. When you have to pay $30 and go to the store or wait 5 days for shipping, you tend to not buy books. When you can click a button and start reading on a paper-like screen instantly, it becomes much easier to read all the books that you've been "meaning to" read. But I digress.)
- jeeringmole 18y agoAn excellent recent book is Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ The approach is what you might guess from the title, so it addresses both the fun of Lisp and the building of practical applications (including web apps).
- elai 18y agoHey you can do this w/ python too! <code> dx = .000001 def deriv(f): def fprime(x): return (f(x+dx) - f(x))/dx return fprime def cube(x): return x3 def printDeriv(x): print (deriv(cube))(x) print 3x*2 printDeriv(5) </code>
- diN0bot 18y agothe four concerns the author lists at the end are interesting for what they say about where he's coming from. to me, the joy of programming is more about programming than speed or efficiency. that he also put 'harder to understand' and 'capability' in the list is confusing. he must mean capability in some kind of raw sense, whereas i see capability as having abstraction and libraries so i can get to the meat faster. again, abstraction is usually easier to understand. perhaps when meat is speed and efficiency then our perspectives merge. psyched about 16 Mb of RAM! btw, scheme has recently been replaced by python in the intro programming courses. snap.
- kragen 18y agoRead the previous post where he was introduced to Lisp by way of MACRO-11, and you'll see what he means by "capability".
- ced 18y agoFunny how tail recursion pretty much has "cute optimization hack" written all over it. It really doesn't feel at home in a first lecture on programming.
- dfox 18y agoTail recursion has profound theoretical implications, so it belongs there. If your language is properly tail-recursive it completely changes definition of recursive and iterative.
- ShardPhoenix 18y agoThat derivative example is nice, but it reinforces that Lisp is a bit too "pure"/"mathy" for my taste (that and I really don't like the syntax). My equivalent of that derivative thing was probably the examples in "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby", pretty syntax-highlighting colors and all.
- dbul 18y agoInteresting first lecture. I think the great Oscar Waddell (a wizard though no longer in academia to my knowledge) wrote a Scheme program centered around beer for our first lecture at IU. Now that caught the attention of many students and I'm pretty sure the class /grew/ in size for the next lecture.