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SICP translated to JavaScript

comp.nus.edu.sg

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Re: SICP translated to JavaScript

#31

Post by brudgers »

hackNightly wrote: post #3
jfe wrote: post #2

why, God, why?

Perhaps due to the increasing popularity of JavaScript and the decreasing accessibility or usage of Scheme.

Due to the increasing popularity of casual dining and the decreasing accessibility of Danish nobility, I've rewritten Hamlet to be an Appleby's assistant manager.

The fifth act of SICP is meta-linguistic abstraction, and among Javascript's merits it is not. SICP is no more a book about Scheme than Moby Dick is a whale tale.

I admire the effort, and understand the sentiment behind the project. I just think the authors are missing the big picture of SICP. In fairness, few of us are Ablesons or Sussmans.

Re: SICP translated to JavaScript

#33

Post by camus »

davexunit wrote: post #21
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #9

Some people will stop at nothing to convert the world to JavaScript and Ruby. (please don't do the latter... or is it too late?)

The web developers have taken over, it seems. Edit: I say this as a web developer. I feel like it's often forgotten that Ruby and Javascript aren't the only languages worth using.

Scala for the win. Most of the ruby goodness with non of the performance problems (at high scale (ie Twitter ...), because ruby is fine for most use cases ). Go is fine, but i dont like the syntax and some of the language design choices

Re: SICP translated to JavaScript

#34

Post by macmac »

brudgers wrote: post #31
hackNightly wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps due to the increasing popularity of JavaScript and the decreasing accessibility or usage of Scheme.

Due to the increasing popularity of casual dining and the decreasing accessibility of Danish nobility, I've rewritten Hamlet to be an Appleby's assistant manager. The fifth act of SICP is meta-linguistic abstraction, and among Javascript's merits it is not. SICP is no more a book about Scheme than Moby Dick is a whale tale. I admire the effort, and understand the sentiment behind the project. I just think the authors…

Thank you for the imagery. As Dane who grew up in Elsinore, it will stay with me for quite a while I am sure.

Re: SICP translated to JavaScript

#35

Post by pjmlp »

davexunit wrote: post #21
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #9

Some people will stop at nothing to convert the world to JavaScript and Ruby. (please don't do the latter... or is it too late?)

The web developers have taken over, it seems. Edit: I say this as a web developer. I feel like it's often forgotten that Ruby and Javascript aren't the only languages worth using.

Well, I never used Ruby, besides to see what this Ruby on Rails was all about and I already knew Python since the version 1 days.

For me the only place for JavaScript is on the browser.

For anything else, there are endless languages to choose from.

Re: SICP translated to JavaScript

#37

Post by archgoon »

jessep wrote: post #26
neilk wrote: post #16

Obvious objections - JS has no tail call elimination, no macros, and state-changing is managed with entirely different conventions in Scheme. Also the conceit of SICP (not really justified) is that they don't have to teach you syntax, because homoiconicity. Still, I think it's a worthy pursuit to try to bring the insights of this book to a wider audience. Side note: the navigation is really irritating. The back butto…

Macros in js: http://sweetjs.org/ "Sweet.js brings the hygienic macros of languages like Scheme and Rust to JavaScript. Macros allow you to sweeten the syntax of JavaScript and craft the language you’ve always wanted."

> Use the sjs binary to compile your sweet.js code:

That isn't JavaScript.

Re: SICP translated to JavaScript

#38

Post by btilly »

neilk wrote: post #16

Obvious objections - JS has no tail call elimination, no macros, and state-changing is managed with entirely different conventions in Scheme. Also the conceit of SICP (not really justified) is that they don't have to teach you syntax, because homoiconicity. Still, I think it's a worthy pursuit to try to bring the insights of this book to a wider audience. Side note: the navigation is really irritating. The back butto…

I know HOP.

It depresses me how much of HOP is irrelevant in Python because they have proper iterators. And how few Perl programmers realize that these days the lack is a major omission in the language.

Re: SICP translated to JavaScript

#39

Post by seiji »

pjmlp wrote: post #35
davexunit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web developers have taken over, it seems. Edit: I say this as a web developer. I feel like it's often forgotten that Ruby and Javascript aren't the only languages worth using.

Well, I never used Ruby, besides to see what this Ruby on Rails was all about and I already knew Python since the version 1 days. For me the only place for JavaScript is on the browser. For anything else, there are endless languages to choose from.

For anything else, there are endless languages to choose from.

The Americans have taken over and the Americans have, based on their own linguistic experience, decided most people can only handle one spoken language and one programming language.

For some of us, we can handle six programming languages and be fine.

For "average" people, they're lucky to get one programming language, so it was decided to fad-hype-hipster promote One Language To Rule Them All for fronted, backend, sideend, middleware, topware, bottomware, programming your embedded system, programming your car, scripting your operating system, and programming your blender.

Look on github for how many people write shell scripts in ruby because they don't know how bash works. You can find the same over-syntax'd-programming-environment-as-shell-script with node too. We're the exceptions. They can't handle the truth.

Re: SICP translated to JavaScript

#40

Post by jophde »

dysoco wrote: post #28

What's next? "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment: Now with Javascript!" ? Or "Linux Device Drivers: Javascript edition" ? Can we just accept that JS is not for everything?

I just want to meet one programmer who can work on server side code, client side code, etc who can't handle them being written in different languages. This fad just doesn't make any sense to me. Let's reinvent the wheel so we can have JSON literals instead of Ruby hashes!
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