I was working my way through SICP last night when I came across a passage that at first struck me as curious, then interesting, then deeply interesting, and finally a little mind-blowing. Out of this little passage I got a little slice of enlightenment about first-order data, how Lisp can be rewritten in Lisp, domain-specific […]

Thanks to raganwald and his syndicated deliciousness, I found Sunday’s Fake Steve Jobs post about the problems at One Laptop per Child. I’m a big fan of satire, and especially web-delivered timely articulate satire. But I was a bit confused by this one, and quite dismayed by the vitriol of the comments. Why are y’all […]

As I wrote just the other day, our study group has encountered the first really meaty part of SICP. Thanks to the combination of lecture notes, the books, and the 20-year-old videos of G. J. Sussman counting his parentheses, I have come to a few interesting conclusions about writing algorithmic programs.

As week 2 comes to a close, I feel compelled to write something about the difference between orthodox computer science pedagogy, as embodied by SICP, and the approaches taken by books of the variety of “Teach Yourself X in Ten Minutes.” I’m writing about technical topics in another post. This post is devoted mostly to […]

We’re just getting started on the MIT OpenCourseWare course Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I got a lot of responses from interested people, which is exciting. So far we haven’t encountered much worth chatting about, but I’m thinking the material’s difficulty is going to increase quickly. In the meantime, I’ve jotted down a few […]