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SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
31–40 of 123 posts
Re: SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
#32Insta buy. I love my SICP book. Need this for fun, perspective to teach juniors, and shelf art. Yes, I pre-ordered. For those complaining about it being in JS, probably didn’t read SICP as it wasn’t about LISP. This isn’t about JS.
> This isn’t about JS. That's precisely why it shouldn't be in JS. Edit: to clarify, javascript is full of random warts that you have to know about in order to use it effectively, that's why I think a language with less such warts would be more suitable for someone that wants to try out and use the ideas book introduces with caring too much about the language.
The most accessible runtime on the planet. To each their own. I loathe JS, but I also believe english is a crap language. English happens to be the only language I can effectively use to describe my ideas to others. :-)
Re: SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
#33Holy crap take a look at some of the JS examples in Chapter 4 - functions declaring functions declaring functions returning functions
I hate this style of coding. I don't see how it's any better than turning everything into data and code in encapsulated class objects and passing them around
You shouldn't read SICP as a guide to practical programming. A lot of things in it would normally be bad style or contrived, but it's interesting to know that they are possible.
Re: SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
#34Maybe SICP will not be better for using Javascript, but perhaps Javascript programmers will get better for reading SICP?
That would be very nice.
Re: SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
#35Maybe SICP will not be better for using Javascript, but perhaps Javascript programmers will get better for reading SICP? That would be very nice.
I'd say JS-only devs would benefit from getting outside of their bubble ASAP, and the original SICP is a very good way to begin doing that.
Re: SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
#36Javascript is eating the world. Only WASM can save us now.
Re: SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
#37One major benefit here is how approachable this is. One could even simply open Dev Tools on their browser and use the console as a REPL. As someone who installed Scheme/Dr Scheme/Dr Racket long ago, it's nice to say, "you can get started right now". I know there'll be a lot of complaint about JS as a language choice but, it's pretty ubiquitous. And, much like Scheme, no one's saying, "you should use this for your nex…
I agree in contrast to the previous reply I made. I still play with Shen, and I would love to see SICP in Shen, since Shen has ben implemented for many languages including JavaScript, but it's still a Lisp. I should try my hand at it if I really want to learn Shen. I am also an APL/J fan and this footnote in SICP rings true: [15] Richard Waters (1979) developed a program that automatically analyzes traditional Fortra…
I wanted to say Shen will never be relevant or useful without a change to it's licensing model, but looking at the website it seems like that exact thing has actually happened? It's hard to find concrete info so I'd love for someone to confirm, but IIRC Shen was encumbered by some sort of distasteful closed source model previously but it looks like that's no longer the case? Very excited to dive in if that's the case.
EDIT: > In 2021 the SP kernel was returned to open source forming the basis for the S series of kernels on which this manual is based.
Re: SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
#38One major benefit here is how approachable this is. One could even simply open Dev Tools on their browser and use the console as a REPL. As someone who installed Scheme/Dr Scheme/Dr Racket long ago, it's nice to say, "you can get started right now". I know there'll be a lot of complaint about JS as a language choice but, it's pretty ubiquitous. And, much like Scheme, no one's saying, "you should use this for your nex…
It's definitely a benefit but the trade-off is rough - the book itself is 'approachable' in the sense that it's written well in an accessible style. But it's dense in concepts and ideas and smacks you with them right off the bat. A lot of them are much more convoluted when expressed in JS, especially for the first time. Take a look at the sort of challenge the authors had to deal with:
https://sicp.sourceacademy.org/chapters/1.1.7.html#ex_1.6
We're just a few pages in and the original instructive exercise of 'why can't I make my own if out of cond' involves learning the JS ternary operator.
Re: SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
#39Maybe SICP will not be better for using Javascript, but perhaps Javascript programmers will get better for reading SICP? That would be very nice.
No, they'll get bad ideas and try to implement them even more badly.
Everybody's dealt with that one asshole* who overdosed on category theory and proceeds to write Haskell in Python for the next two years.
* It's me, I'm that asshole.
Re: SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
#40One major benefit here is how approachable this is. One could even simply open Dev Tools on their browser and use the console as a REPL. As someone who installed Scheme/Dr Scheme/Dr Racket long ago, it's nice to say, "you can get started right now". I know there'll be a lot of complaint about JS as a language choice but, it's pretty ubiquitous. And, much like Scheme, no one's saying, "you should use this for your nex…
I agree in contrast to the previous reply I made. I still play with Shen, and I would love to see SICP in Shen, since Shen has ben implemented for many languages including JavaScript, but it's still a Lisp. I should try my hand at it if I really want to learn Shen. I am also an APL/J fan and this footnote in SICP rings true: [15] Richard Waters (1979) developed a program that automatically analyzes traditional Fortra…
> [15] Richard Waters (1979) developed a program that automatically analyzes traditional Fortran programs
Anyone have a PDF link to a paper about this Fortran analyzer?