Tag Archives: Scheme

A Beautiful On-line Version of SICP

Posted on 2017-03-23 by jcs

If, like me, you’re a lover of SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) you’ll be happy to know that there’s a beautiful on-line version of it available. Years ago, MIT generously put up a version but some of the … Continue reading →

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Guile 2.2

Posted on 2017-03-16 by jcs

The long awaited 2.2.0 version of Guile has been released. This version is a significant update to the Guile system. It includes a new compiler and VM and several other performance enhancing changes. They even boast a complete Elisp emulation. … Continue reading →

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Starting with Scheme

Posted on 2017-02-18 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has an interesting post on using Scheme as a first language for CS instruction. That’s not a new idea, of course. MIT’s famed 6.001 course (Entry Level Computing) used Scheme and SICP for years. Their course was adopted … Continue reading →

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SICP in Info

Posted on 2016-08-02 by jcs

Those of you who have been around for a while know that I consider Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) one of the best—if not the best—computer science books ever written. I was an experienced software engineer when I … Continue reading →

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Guile

Posted on 2016-07-23 by jcs

I haven’t written much about Scheme lately because I wasn’t able to get Guile to compile on my Macs. Today I saw this nice video of Andy Wingo talking about building programs with Scheme and Guile. He discussed the current … Continue reading →

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Chez Scheme Open Sourced

Posted on 2016-05-10 by jcs

Chez Scheme has always been an excellent Scheme implementation. It produces very fast object code and is a complete R6RS implementation with extensions. Chez Scheme was written by Kent Dybvig, who also wrote the excellent The SCHEME Programming Language (also … Continue reading →

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Lisp Performance

Posted on 2015-10-14 by jcs

One of the tiresome things that Lispers keep hearing from the misinformed is that Lisp systems are too slow for production work. Here’s a very impressive counter example to that notion. JCG over at the Racket Users forum reports that … Continue reading →

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Sad But True

Posted on 2015-04-17 by jcs

Seems indicative of shifting expectations/demands that SICP used to be freshman course book; now it's considered "super advanced reading" :/ — Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) March 26, 2015

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Streams in Common Lisp

Posted on 2015-01-28 by jcs

One of nicest techniques from Scheme is the idea of streams. Streams1 let you create a virtually infinite list. For example, we can compute the square roots of the first 5 Fibonacci numbers with (mapcar #’sqrt ‘(0 1 1 2 … Continue reading →

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Working Through SICP

Posted on 2014-04-10 by jcs

As I’ve said many times before, I’m a huge fan of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), Hal Abelson’s and Jerry Sussman’s seminal work on computer science. It’s a tremendous resource and one that’s available on the Web … Continue reading →

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