XiXiDu comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: AdeleneDawner 01 March 2010 09:25AM

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Comment author: XiXiDu 02 March 2010 12:32:01PM 2 points [-]

I learnt about Lua thru Metaplace, which is now dead. I heard about Processing via Anders Sandberg.

I'm always fascinated by data visualisation. I thought Processing might come in handy.

Thanks for mentioning SICP. I'll check it out.

Comment author: gwern 04 March 2010 02:01:15AM 1 point [-]

I'm going through SICP now. I'm not getting as much out of it as I expected, because much of it I already know, is uninteresting to me since I expect lazy evaluation due to Haskell, or is just tedious (I got sick pretty quick with the authors' hard-on for number theory).

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 05 March 2010 04:35:42AM 1 point [-]

SICP is nice if you've never seen a lambda abstraction before; its value decreases monotonically with increasing exposure to functional programming. You can probably safely skim the majority of it, at most do a handful of the exercises that don't immediately make you yawn just by looking at them.

Scheme isn't much more than an impure, strict untyped λ-calculus; it seems embarrassingly simple (which is also its charm!) from the perspective of someone comfortable working in a pure, non-strict bastardization of some fragment of System F-ω or whatever it is that GHC is these days.

Haskell does tend to ruin one for other languages, though lately I've been getting slightly frustrated with some of Haskell's own limitations...