61–70 of 116 posts
Really sad to see that such amazing book that uses such nice language is now transformed to monster with JS. Why would you do that? Painful to see all that...
This will only serve to perpetuate the stupid meme that "Javascript is basically Scheme with curly braces and semicolons"
(Note that the author intended this to be humourous/exaggerated - Some people took exception though.)
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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.
@seiji Average programmers aren't working on shell scripts, client side code, and server side code at the same time.
Honestly, HN too has hordes of people who can't write FizzBuzz. No reason to feel elitist for anybody really.
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?
Maybe not everything, but to explain the concepts behind SICP, why not.
It's true that the ideas in the book transcend programming languages, and that the first 3 chapters could probably could be covered in JavaScript with little modification, if a little clumsily. But rewriting the 4th and 5th to include sections on parsing JavaScript would be quite challenging, and furthermore JavaScript does not have as simple semantics as Scheme, so there would be a loss of a great deal of elegance and beauty. The metacircular Scheme interpreter can run itself, which would be harder to do in JavaScript since its core is more rich and Scheme's core: objects, methods and so on complicate it quite a bit.
Most of chapter 4 will be impossible to really translate to JS because JS has no macros (required to implement some of the special forms like delay) and isn't homoiconic.
http://sweetjs.org/
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@seiji Average programmers aren't working on shell scripts, client side code, and server side code at the same time.
And everyone is better than the average. :) Honestly, HN too has hordes of people who can't write FizzBuzz. No reason to feel elitist for anybody really.
I have been coding since 1986 and only learned about it via the usual HN hiring discussions.
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Perhaps due to the increasing popularity of JavaScript and the decreasing accessibility or usage of Scheme.
SICP uses Scheme, not Common Lisp. Scheme is a deliberately minimalist language, which is fairly accessible and easy to write your own implementation of. In fact, in SICP, you do that, a couple of times, writing first a Scheme interpreter, then extending it in various ways like adding logic programming capabilities, then you write a virtual machine and a compiler that compiles down to that virtual machine. JavaScript…
Ever looked at R6RS?
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Perhaps due to the increasing popularity of JavaScript and the decreasing accessibility or usage of Scheme.
SICP isn't a book about Scheme. It's a book about writing computer programs. Scheme was used because it imposes the minimum additional cognitive load. Worrying about all the warts in, e.g. Common Lisp (to say nothing about Javascript or Scala, say) would detract from the pedagogical mission of the book.
You can use a subset of Common Lisp and the programs in SICP would mostly look the same when written in that CL subset.
I have a surprise for you: Scheme has warts, too.
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.
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Maybe not everything, but to explain the concepts behind SICP, why not.
As others have pointed out, chapters 4 and 5 are as wonderful and rich as they are because Scheme is homoiconic which makes writing Scheme interpreters and compilers in Scheme very easy -- no need for hairy lexing and parsing steps. Since (IMHO) these chapters are the best introduction to the study of programming languages and their implementation, it would be a real shame to discard them simply because JavaScript is…
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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!
I always thought this would be self-evident to people, but apparently not: The reason why I want to have Javascript on both the client and the server is so I can re-use code. My software has a fairly large chunk of code which is a gardening expert system. I'm hesitant to call it AI because it's so dumb, but it's along those lines. It knows things like "If you live in Phoenix and it's April, you should wait to plant y…