SILK - Scheme In 50 KB
Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
#32I wonder if any teacher already tried to teach LISP as a first language instead of java or C, and what there was to learn about it.
MIT is where the legendary "Wizard Book" (SICP)[0] was developed, for teaching their introductory class using Scheme. A few years ago, MIT restructured their entire CS curriculum (not just the intro class) in a way that required redesigning the individual curricula of each of the classes, including the intro class. As a result, they couldn't use SICP, since it didn't cover the same topics. At this time, they ended up…
There's a bit more that went into all of this:
MIT's EECS undergraduate enrollment cratered after the "dot.com" crash, more than halved, after being 40% of the student body for decades.
The department panicked.
And it was most certainly ordered that Scheme be entirely purged from the base curriculum, even while they claimed they were teaching SICP concepts and functional programming in 6.005, they were using Java, a language that's "not even wrong" for the purpose (that, at least, has been improved to Python, which is only [fill in the blank] hostile to FP).
Not one of the department's finer moments, from my no direct interest in EE at all viewpoint, but from a less biased one you can safely say a MIT EECS degree now means something quite different. And it's a damned shame for those outside the department, for whom 6.001 was truly valuable, that MIT no longer offers anything in its niche (outside of a rearguard 1 month version of it during January).
Re: Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
#33Here's a link to PG's essay and speech excerpts on why Lisp is great for web-based applications (2001) - http://www.paulgraham.com/lwba.html PG delivered a similar message to my undergraduate CS class in 1996/7 as a guest speaker when he was working on Viaweb and extolling the virtues of LISP for server-side web applications.
It's strange that it took so long for someone to mention pg. Viaweb was written in lisp, and the site we're on is in arc, a lisp dialect.
Re: Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
#34For a moment, it really appeared LISP is acronym:
anguage for nternet cripting and
rogramming rather than LISt Processing.
Re: Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replacing (or adding a second option of) a scripting language for the DOM in an existing browser is going to be tough, regardless of what the existing language is (which happens to be Javascript in all modern browsers). I'm not sure about that, DOM access is a bit of a mess and the js stdlib is not great either, it wouldn't be hard to improve on it. It's a real shame we've ended up in a situation where the only API f…
> I'm not sure about that, DOM access is a bit of a mess and the js stdlib is not great either, it wouldn't be hard to improve on it You'll get no disagreement from me about the JS stdlib. I was shocked when I found the "correct" way to extract the day of the week from a Date object in Javascript (without third-party libraries): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4822852/javascript-how-t... [0] It would be a great f…
Many languages have a great stdlib already available, all they need is an improved version of the DOM glue for events and elements (find, adjust, add). It is doable, and the vast majority of script-browser interaction is merely to find and adjust the state of some DOM elements and respond to clicks etc. You could start small and build up and still have something useful, though security and sandboxing might be the hardest issues to cover. New native platform APIs on the desktop or mobile are rewritten from the ground up regularly and those are far, far larger projects (e.g. on Mac OS Classic, Appkit, UIKit, etc).
I think the problem has not been so much that this task is incredibly difficult, but that browser vendors have very little incentive to add a new language in addition to js - it's already a money and time sink maintaining a browser, so they're not going to volunteer to make more work for themselves without a payoff for the corporation paying the bills.
Re: Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even "in place of" but "in addition to". There's a reason that the script tag has a language attribute as part of the standard.
I'm afraid you're browser doesn't support XScript, please download Chrome Explorer 310. On a serious note, JavaScript and the lack of fragmentation is one of the best features of Web. You don't have to download appropriate browsers (in theory and mostly in practice) to run your website.
> I'm afraid you're browser doesn't support XScript, please download Chrome Explorer 310.
But this sort of thing already happens all the time. You don't have the right flash player, or the right silverlight player, or the right version of Java. There would be very little difference in the UX between different scripting languages and the current UX w.r.t. media codexes, and the end result would be the same in both cases: there would be some repertoire of languages and codexes that everyone uses and become standard.
The alternative is to forever have to deal with a language that by design cannot even handle integer math or unicode strings properly.
Re: Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
#37I wonder if any teacher already tried to teach LISP as a first language instead of java or C, and what there was to learn about it.
Sure. They did at Chicago when I was there, lo these twenty four years ago. CS 115-116 was just MIT's SICP 6.005 or whatever. Of course, when I was there there wasn't a CS degree -- you got a math degree with a concentration in CS. So times have undoubtably changed.
Re: Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm afraid you're browser doesn't support XScript, please download Chrome Explorer 310. On a serious note, JavaScript and the lack of fragmentation is one of the best features of Web. You don't have to download appropriate browsers (in theory and mostly in practice) to run your website.
> I'm afraid you're browser doesn't support XScript, please download Chrome Explorer 310. But this sort of thing already happens all the time. You don't have the right flash player, or the right silverlight player, or the right version of Java. There would be very little difference in the UX between different scripting languages and the current UX w.r.t. media codexes, and the end result would be the same in both cas…
> But this sort of thing already happens all the time. You don't have the right flash player, or the right silverlight player, or the right version of Java.
That's exactly the point. Imagine dozens of them.
Re: Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
#39I wonder if any teacher already tried to teach LISP as a first language instead of java or C, and what there was to learn about it.
Lisps have been used continuously for university level introductory programming courses at least since MIT's 6.001 in the 1980's. Today, PLT (the group responsible for Racket) might be considered to be the leader in research into the pedagogy of computer programming and Felleisen's How to Design Programs and student language sequence are used by several schools. I believe they include Rice, University of British Columbia, Brown, and Felleisen's Northeastern University.
The PLT Group's homepage: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/
Re: Lisp: A Language for Internet Scripting and Programming (1998) [pdf]
#40Browser makers like Mozilla have had the option, at any time, to enable the use of Lisp (or any other language) in the place of Javascript. Nothing uniquely qualifies Javascript.
Once you "accept" transpilation,you can use any language in the browser and you stop asking yourself these questions.
You still need to know javascript though. Dart,CoffeeScript,Typescript,ClosureScript... IT's not like people dont have the choice today.And sourcemaps work well when debugging,usually.