begin quoting David Brown as of Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 03:24:12PM -0800: > On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 02:23:04PM -0800, Mark Schoonover wrote: > > >I never heard of these two books. I've looked at them quickly, and > >from what I can tell, they teach you Scheme in order to understand > >various computer science topics. The way I understand SICP is that > >they teach various computer science topics, then demonstrate that > >with Lisp. By going through SICP, you won't be a Lisp programmer > >necessarily. For myself, I'm more interested in the theory, and I > >really don't care what the language is used to demonstrate. Plus the > >history of the course, the available resources etc has me leaning > >more towards jumping straight in to SICP. > > Good summary. SICP is a book about fairly hardcore computer science > topics, that happens to use Scheme as the language. If your goal is to > learn scheme, there are other books that do that better. SICP uses scheme > because it is easier to get the language out of the way and focus on the > concepts.
I find that improbable, as Scheme is one of those languages that takes me several minutes to "get the mode", and a couple of hours to grok it to the point of thinking in schemisms. Maybe things will have changed for me in the past dozen years, who knows? It'll be interesting to see how well it works. My disbelief is probably founded on encountering scheme as my ... ninth(?) programming language. I was pretty well schooled in the procedural languages by then. . . > Actually, the language is simple enough that in the course of > the book, you end up implementing the advanced concepts instead of just > using them in a larger language or library. I read the first few pages of the book, and found myself wondering if (define symbol value) modifies the global symbol table, and thinking that if it does, that's not really a good thing. I don't like globals anymore. -- I like memory maps. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
