Nano-Blog : April 20, 2025

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Nano-Blog for the week of April 20, 2025.

§ April 24, 2025

A Very Small Lisp in 99 Lines of C

Lisp, as we all know, is not one language, but a family of languages which share features like support for recursion, functional evaluation as a core concept and too many parentheses. One of the more interesting Lisps from recent years is Robert van Engelen's TinyLisp, which provides a complete (though limited) implementation in 99 lines of C. It is a delightful learning tool which introduces the reader to core concepts of the language. It is well worth your time to download, compile and play with it. And at the very least, read van Engelen's paper about his TinyLisp.

#c-programming #lisp #programming
Introductory Books About Writing Software

As mentioned previously, Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (aka SICP) was the sine qua non for programming instruction in the 1980s and much of the 1990s. Many geeks were introduced to their craft with this text. But it is not without its detractors, or at least people who perceive improvements could be made with SICP. One such text, How to Design Programs (aka HtDP) can be unreservedly recommended. Debate rages in various corners of the internet as to which you should read first, and we offer no advice other than both are well worth your time.

SICP has a Wikipedia page, an official page at MIT Press and a series of video lectures based on it. The last reference in the previous sentence links into the Open Course-Ware site for the online version of 6.001 : Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course, which also includes course notes. It can be downloaded free of charge from the MIT web site at https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf.

HtDP (How to Design Programs) also has a wikipedia page and an official web page (where the 1st edition may be freely downloaded.) We have yet to find video lectures based on this text, however.

Another text we've seen at the Bit-Roastery, Don't Teach Coding (Until You Read this Book) by Foster and Handley reads less like a textbook and more like the memoir of programming instructors. It purports to present recent scientific research on how the brain learns coding, though reviewers at the Bit-Roastery remain somewhat skeptical of that claim. But there is enough good content in the text to recommend reading it. The text's accompanying web site now returns errors and we can't find a legitimate free copy to download, but the parts we liked, we really liked. The worldcat link above should provide pointers to copies in libraries around the world.

No discussion of programming pedagogy is complete without mentioning Seymour Papert's Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. Written in 1980, this text documents Papert and Solomon's research in teaching kids to code. Papert is known for the constructionism pedagogical perspective (distinct, but related to Piaget's constructivism.) The text is not without its detractors, but is still worth a read for it's bridging of computer science and education schools of thought. The Bit-Roastery maintains that communicating complex software design to fellow technical workers is not completely unlike teaching children to program. Building a theory of mind regarding how your peers construct meaning from your utterances is useful for anyone in a technical field. Reading this text is well worth your time.

#books #scheme

§ April 20, 2025

Henry Laxen's Comments about FORTH

In the 1980s, one of the more popular FORTH implementations was Laxen & Perry L&P-83 by Henry Laxen and Mike Perry. If you were doing FORTH on 8 or 16 bit microcomputers, you (at least) looked at L&P FORTH, even if you weren't using it. In 2002, Henry Laxen made a few comments about the joys of FORTH on Slashdot. We couldn't find an archived version on the Internet Archive or via Bing, Google or DuckDuckGo search. But someone put up just his comments on the AtariWiki at Henry Laxen on Slashdot 2002. It's short and Worth a read.

#forth
Why MIT 6.001 is No Longer Taught with Scheme

Several software hackers of a particular age cut their teeth on SICP : Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. It was the name of the book and the introductory courseware where students were presented with a high-level explanation of programming from Hal Abelson and Jerry Sussman. Then, all of the sudden, MIT stopped teaching SICP using Scheme and started teaching it's intro classes with Python. This video, from an NYC Lisp Meetup in 2016, Sussman explains why that happened...

#Gerald-Sussman #scheme #SICP #video