Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Little Typer (2018)

thelittletyper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 45 posts

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#3

Post by kevindamm »

I liked the dialogue-driven format of this and the others in the series (I've read Schemer and Learner too), at least once I got used to the split-mind feel of it, but I feel it would be better as an interactive media instead of the books.

There's an expectation that you're following along and typing nearly every line into the appropriate REPL. I found this difficult to do while juggling the hardcopies and not any easier on an ebook reader -- I could stop worrying about cracking the spine but the digital copies I sampled or purchased always completely ruined the typesetting. All the REPL interactions are transcribed as images, and the constant focus-and-pinch-zoom disrupts the engagement.

I ended up just reading through and hoping to catch enough of the gist of things then doing my usual side-project-as-learning instrument thing. I hope somebody tries to build an interactive playground for this book or the Little Learner, complete with guiding dialog.

The typesetting in the hardcopies is really unique and impressive.

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#4

Post by ahelwer »

I worked through this a few years ago and it is wonderful, but I found chapter 9 on the replace function totally impenetrable, so I wrote a blog post in the same dialogue style intended as a gentler prelude to it. A few people have emailed me saying they found it and it helped them. https://ahelwer.ca/post/2022-10-13-little-typer-ch9/

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#6

Post by kccqzy »

I bought this book when it first came out. Unfortunately this book required a time commitment greater than what I had available at that time and I didn't finish. It's thoroughly enjoyable (at least the first few chapters) but it requires a level of thinking that might not be available if you just finished a day of work.

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#7

Post by crdrost »

ahelwer wrote: post #4

I worked through this a few years ago and it is wonderful, but I found chapter 9 on the replace function totally impenetrable, so I wrote a blog post in the same dialogue style intended as a gentler prelude to it. A few people have emailed me saying they found it and it helped them. https://ahelwer.ca/post/2022-10-13-little-typer-ch9/

This is great for me for a completely auxiliary reason, which is that I wanted to know whether this was just gonna be a book about programming Fibonacci numbers into types or some ish... and in some ways it's kinda worse, at chapter 9 you are still proving that different takes on x→x+1 are the same. (But using rewrite rules seems kinda interesting in the abstract I guess.)

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#9

Post by ducktective »

What modern scheme is best to use for these "the little x'er" book series? Some of them suggest their dialect (like learner suggests Racket I think), but what about others? In short, what scheme is the most practical and useful nowadays?

Here is the result of my research so far, in order of preference according to the above requirements:

Guile: most active community, GNU glue language, Guix

Chicken: most pragmatic one with a package manager but older

Chez: most performant one, less active community and libraries

Re: The Little Typer (2018)

#10

Post by RedNifre »

ducktective wrote: post #9

What modern scheme is best to use for these "the little x'er" book series? Some of them suggest their dialect (like learner suggests Racket I think), but what about others? In short, what scheme is the most practical and useful nowadays? Here is the result of my research so far, in order of preference according to the above requirements: Guile: most active community, GNU glue language, Guix Chicken: most pragmatic on…

This one comes with its own language, "Pie", which you can use in DrRacket with #lang pie
Post reply on HN