gwern comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (658)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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...