81–90 of 140 posts
Are they still going to teach Scheme in any other course(s)? Why not teach both? I had the privilege of taking an SICP-based course at the U(C). The brain-stretching is critical, isn't it? Yes, there's a lot of head-slamming that goes into modern development, but that's not really the same thing.
over IAP I heard they did a bootcamp version of the scheme course.
Blog spam. It is a huge quote from this: http://wingolog.org/archives/2009/03/24/international-lisp-c...
I'm a PhD student at MIT and arrived to my office on Monday to find the International Lisp Conference had set up shop downstairs. Let me just tell you.. I've never seen so many bearded people in one place!
So I suppose beards either mean lit gurus or lisp hackers.
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> If you can convey 95% of the basic ideas in Python But you cannot. Some of the ideas in SICP can nearly be conveyed in Python (like lexical scoping, closures, data types, streams). You'll use built-in language features in Python (classes, generators) instead of implementing the functionality. I think that implementing these things is important if you want to really understand them. An example, cons, car and cdr fro…
def cons(a, b): return lambda f: f(a, b) def car(p): return p(lambda a,b: a) def cdr(p): return p(lambda a,b: b) As well as in theory you can do this in practice. It's about as elegant (hard for me to judge as I have a strong pro-lisp bias). Aside from lack of tail safety and performance issues with writing scheme-ish code I don't see why you couldn't implement those things in Python. The main difference is that typi…
This may not be important if you teach programming to people who want use programming languages, but it is important for people who want to advance the state of the art in programming (i.e. CS students).
Maybe it's better if you teach Scheme in a seperate class class for CS students.
It it just me who is seeing a cowardly surrender to cultural decay here? From the renowned Sussman, no less. The glorious MIT of the 1980s and prior appears to be dead. Erased, in fact, without a trace. Consider the following: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=2 These are the latest releases from MIT press. Among them you will find nothing remotely like SICP, but plenty of postmodernist/related…
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I beleive actually that s-expression are going to come back. Clojure, Arc, R6RS - these are harbingers of the return, I think.
JSON is much more popular than s-expressions, and not just accidentally. Explicit, compact syntax for both lists and key-value pairs is The Right Thing in a language like this. { "x": [ { "y": "a", "z": 23, "q": [ 54, 32, 45 ] } ], "r": 43 }
The other difference is that there are JSON parsers and generators for more languages and they're not programmable.
Hi, I am MIT student in CS and I took 6.001 (the new course is called 6.01). When I asked the instructor why we are using some language that has almost no practical use, they told me that the reasons are: - it teaches the concepts of the class well - after it one can learn any programming language very easily. I believe both of these to be true. From my point of view the new 6.01 sacrifises depth for breadth. This is…
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JSON is much more popular than s-expressions, and not just accidentally. Explicit, compact syntax for both lists and key-value pairs is The Right Thing in a language like this. { "x": [ { "y": "a", "z": 23, "q": [ 54, 32, 45 ] } ], "r": 43 }
Why can't we keep the indents and drop the parens?
(I actually prefer Python's style of using indentation to indicate blocks, but I recognize generating such code is harder than code with tokens.)
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def cons(a, b): return lambda f: f(a, b) def car(p): return p(lambda a,b: a) def cdr(p): return p(lambda a,b: b) As well as in theory you can do this in practice. It's about as elegant (hard for me to judge as I have a strong pro-lisp bias). Aside from lack of tail safety and performance issues with writing scheme-ish code I don't see why you couldn't implement those things in Python. The main difference is that typi…
The problem is not that you can't do this in Python, but that this is out of place in a Python course (you don't use linked lists in Python, for example). SICP shows that you need only a very small number of primitives to get a full programming language. You don't get this elegance with Python. This may not be important if you teach programming to people who want use programming languages, but it is important for peo…
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I think here, "practicality" means "has a library for controlling robots". Also a good numeric library, a good matlab-like graphing library, good 3D graphics, good real-time performance, easy C++ embedding, etc. Rather than complaining about how everyone else is a bonehead for not using Lisp, write some libraries to make it useful for more things in the real world. Also, Python does pretty well for real-time control.…
Libraries aren't the issue. I use Chicken Scheme for a few things, which has plenty of libraries and a fantastic package system called eggs. Sure, other languages like Perl and Python have more libraries now, but that's not what made them popular. What made them popular was the design of the core languages. I started using Ruby because it was faster to type and easier to remember how to do things than Perl, not becau…
user> (def h {:foo "hi"})
#'user/h
user> (h :foo)
"hi"
user> (h :bar)
nil
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JSON is much more popular than s-expressions, and not just accidentally. Explicit, compact syntax for both lists and key-value pairs is The Right Thing in a language like this. { "x": [ { "y": "a", "z": 23, "q": [ 54, 32, 45 ] } ], "r": 43 }
Why can't we keep the indents and drop the parens?