Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
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Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
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Re: Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
#2Please resubmit with the actual story, not your G+ profile link:
Re: Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
#3I got great grades in college, but could never wrap my head around LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses). For anything non-trivial, I cheated and handed in somebody else's work.
There, I said it.
Re: Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
#4I got great grades in college, but could never wrap my head around LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses). For anything non-trivial, I cheated and handed in somebody else's work. There, I said it.
I get the impression Lisp tended to be taught awfully, uninspiringly. Maybe even worse than other programming languages. Cheating sounds like a reasonable response to such a farce of "education"; sad to hear when exposure to Lisp is a soul-crushing experience.
I've seen a few old AI books where Lisp code is formatted unreadably. I wonder why.
Re: Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
#5I got great grades in college, but could never wrap my head around LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses). For anything non-trivial, I cheated and handed in somebody else's work. There, I said it.
Strange. I never learned it in college, just on my own for fun, but I've found it to be quite elegant (if impractical compared to better modern languages). The fact that everything is an expression and you can use any expression anywhere makes it very easy to learn, and powerful.
I personally find it more enjoyable to use than things like C. Then again, for one historical reason or another, C-type languages won, and nowadays are the easiest path to making software, since you'll inevitably have to interact with an OS, window toolkit, libraries, etc..., that all have a C/C++ interface...
Re: Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
#6I got great grades in college, but could never wrap my head around LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses). For anything non-trivial, I cheated and handed in somebody else's work. There, I said it.
[deleted]
Re: Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
#7I got great grades in college, but could never wrap my head around LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses). For anything non-trivial, I cheated and handed in somebody else's work. There, I said it.
I get the impression Lisp tended to be taught awfully, uninspiringly. Maybe even worse than other programming languages. Cheating sounds like a reasonable response to such a farce of "education"; sad to hear when exposure to Lisp is a soul-crushing experience. I've seen a few old AI books where Lisp code is formatted unreadably. I wonder why.
[deleted]
Re: Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
#8I got great grades in college, but could never wrap my head around LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses). For anything non-trivial, I cheated and handed in somebody else's work. There, I said it.
I get the impression Lisp tended to be taught awfully, uninspiringly. Maybe even worse than other programming languages. Cheating sounds like a reasonable response to such a farce of "education"; sad to hear when exposure to Lisp is a soul-crushing experience. I've seen a few old AI books where Lisp code is formatted unreadably. I wonder why.
Georgia Tech, one of the top schools in the US, couldn't even teach lisp. They tried scheme with SICP (IIRC, not sure what else would have been used in 2001). It ended with a major cheating scandal [1]. I was convinced at the time the issue was a lack of understanding on the parts of the TAs. Very few of them had a background in scheme, it was the blind leading the blind according to friends who had started that year (2001, I started in 2000). Since so many students took intro to computing and there were only a few lecturers, the TAs had to do the bulk of the real instruction (that is, non-200+ student lectures). This resulted (at least for a time) in a fragmenting of the introductory programming material, and it leaving the hands of the College of Computing. Non-CS/EE/CMPE engineering students ended up in courses using matlab, without ever actually studying algorithm design/analysis (which is what CS 1311/1321/1511/whatever other numbers they'd used previously) used to cover.
[1] http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2002/01/cheating-scanda...
Re: Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the impression Lisp tended to be taught awfully, uninspiringly. Maybe even worse than other programming languages. Cheating sounds like a reasonable response to such a farce of "education"; sad to hear when exposure to Lisp is a soul-crushing experience. I've seen a few old AI books where Lisp code is formatted unreadably. I wonder why.
Georgia Tech, one of the top schools in the US, couldn't even teach lisp. They tried scheme with SICP (IIRC, not sure what else would have been used in 2001). It ended with a major cheating scandal [1]. I was convinced at the time the issue was a lack of understanding on the parts of the TAs. Very few of them had a background in scheme, it was the blind leading the blind according to friends who had started that year…
At least as far as I can tell, the problem was that they required everyone to learn scheme, including the non-CS majors.
Re: Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
#10What does he mean when he says that it's not possible to write a C program that can write other C programs?
Seems like there are counterexamples here: http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm
Furthermore, it's possible to encode another programs' code into a single print statement, thereby writing one piece of code with another. As that's trivial, I suspect he meant something else. What was it? :).