Not Lisp again....

This is the essence of that "This is so cool"-feeling that arises when you first really _get_ programming.<p>And almost makes me want to invest in SICP or something similar to see what all this LISP-talk is about :)

I loved this same course (spring '87 for me), but I wasn't impressed with the speed. I came away thinking Scheme was for fun and C was for practical programming. I've come around since then, and I don't have any performance concerns about my Scheme-based web site.

Hey you can do this w/ python too!<p>&#60;code&#62; dx = .000001<p>def deriv(f): def fprime(x): return (f(x+dx) - f(x))/dx return fprime<p>def cube(x): return x<i></i>3<p>def printDeriv(x): print (deriv(cube))(x) print 3<i>x</i>*2<p>printDeriv(5) &#60;/code&#62;

An excellent recent book is Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. <a href="http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/</a> The approach is what you might guess from the title, so it addresses both the fun of Lisp and the building of practical applications (including web apps).

Funny how tail recursion pretty much has "cute optimization hack" written all over it. It really doesn't feel at home in a first lecture on programming.

Summary: tail recursion FTW!<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_recursion" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_recursion</a>

Interesting first lecture. I think the great Oscar Waddell (a wizard though no longer in academia to my knowledge) wrote a Scheme program centered around beer for our first lecture at IU. Now <i>that</i> caught the attention of many students and I'm pretty sure the class /grew/ in size for the next lecture.

the four concerns the author lists at the end are interesting for what they say about where he's coming from. to me, the joy of programming is more about programming than speed or efficiency.<p>that he also put 'harder to understand' and 'capability' in the list is confusing. he must mean capability in some kind of raw sense, whereas i see capability as having abstraction and libraries so i can get to the meat faster. again, abstraction is usually easier to understand.<p>perhaps when meat is speed and efficiency then our perspectives merge. psyched about 16 Mb of RAM!<p>btw, scheme has recently been replaced by python in the intro programming courses. snap.

That derivative example is nice, but it reinforces that Lisp is a bit too "pure"/"mathy" for my taste (that and I really don't like the syntax). My equivalent of that derivative thing was probably the examples in "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby", pretty syntax-highlighting colors and all.