This is fantastic! Really looking forward to the web chapter!
Learn Lisp the Hard Way
141–144 of 144 posts
Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, a really solid understanding of substitution is probably one of the major contributions of lambda calculus. For what's effectively an implementation to get that wrong is pretty pathological. And also, there's no reason to defend it. It's a bug. Period. Yet here we are. And there's a whole hell of a lot more in the world than software development... To the extent that lisp captures any of these other foundatio…
> Stepping back to the original point, there are other significantly important/powerful ideas in the world, and lisp users are somewhat over-the-top in their significance-to-hype ratio. Lisp is not a version of lambda calculus. It's a programming language. Macro programming in Lisp works fine in many cases. > type theory does better ... not the role of type systems in the world of practical software development). Lis…
Right, okay, so lisp is primarily a programming language for practical software development. That's really my whole point.
I'd argue that there are lots of other settings with ideas a powerful or more powerful than whatever it is each individual evangelist feels someone should get out a lisp. Yet none of these other things have enlightened evangelists pushing the product.
That's all I'm saying.
Re: Learn Lisp the Hard Way
#143" that Lisp is not already the de-facto programming language is just a reflection of the state of the world as a whole—only a very small percentage of the population are excited for the technological singularity, but the singularity is coming no matter how much people complain. " As a transhumanist myself I resent the arrogance that led to this ridiculous appropriation. Yes, Lisp is pretty great, but the use of other…
MIRI (one of the more well known groups of people serious about the singularity) actually recommend people learn Haskell if they want to contribute to mathematical, statistical, AI research. http://intelligence.org/courses/ https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell
You should also learn Scheme, too.
From your link:
> The first self-modifying AIs will hopefully be written in functional programming languages, so learn something useful like Haskell or Scheme.