Originally posted here:
Initially, the folks participating are primarily either co-workers or non-co-worker friends who have wide range of experience and interests.
From my perspective, everyone is welcome.
The more interested, motivated participants the better!
I’ve been delighted by the number of folks that have showed up on the Internet either to participate or help. There are a lot of great people out there!
About three weeks ago I “made it official” and announced the Study-HTDP for any folks who may be interested. I figured that I would post both to the group itself, and mirror the interesting things here. It didn’t really work out that way.
Focusing on the work and not much else, I’ve posted exclusively to the group. Since we’re only two weeks into it, though, I’m going to make a change and post the most interesting content here. The reason is that I want to be sure to have a place to keep my notes and thoughts on things so that they don’t get totally lost in the overall group.
For my BarCampMadison2 presentation this year, I prepared a DVD “gift bag” with a lot of material on Functional Programming (FP) and specific FP languages like Scheme and Haskell, and also included DrScheme binaries for Mac and Windows and source for UNIX.
Yesterday I received an email from one of the attendees. He was copying the contents of the DVD to a directory on his UNIX system. In the course of doing so, he got an error message. If you are even superficially familiar with Monads and Haskell (as I am), you will surely find this error message prodigious!
/mnt/cdrom$ cp -R library ~/lisp-library
cp: cannot access `library/Haskell/Monads': Input/output error
Originally I figured that a lot of my thoughts would show up here, but they haven’t. Instead they get posted directly to the group. That said, here are some thoughts from the week:
Study-HTDP is a study group for folks who want to read through HTDP. My rationale is explained here. I suspect that many blog posts in the following months will be tagged with ‘Study-HTDP’.
I’m pretty excited to see how this turns out. I hope not only to learn a lot about programming, but also about learning with other folks, especially with this distributed/online model.
Originally published here:
You may or may not know that the authors of HTDP are all directly available on the PLT Discussion list located here:
http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme/
You might rightly be wondering why you would post messages here rather than directly to the PLT list? Well, there are two good reasons:
1. This group has a very focused goal. We can leverage our similar interests, and answer a lot of questions that anyone on our track would need answered once, and build a focused knowledge base. The PLT list discussed a much broader range of topics, mostly focusing on Scheme.
2. All of those guys on the PLT list are super nice folks, and world-class programmers, who are *happy* to answer our questions (even stupid ones, seriously). Buy why bother them with questions that we can answer ourselves? We can make life easier for the PLT folks by answering said questions here, first, and leaving tough questions for them.
One thing to note here is that there is a read-only mirror of this group located here:
http://groups.google.com/group/plt-scheme
This provides a nicer interface and more importantly the ability to search messages which is particularly helpful if you know for what you are looking.
It might be a good resource if you are looking for HTDP focused content.
Originally published here:
Do you love programming?
Does the famous Alan Perlis quip that “[Any programming language] that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.” give you a rush?
Are you obsessed with becoming a better programmer?
I am. That is why I started this Google group called ‘Study-HTDP’.
I want a place where I can study, collaborate, and learn while we I down this path; and I figured “Why go it alone?”
_How_to_Design_Programs_ (HTDP) is a book about learning how to think about programming. I’ve no doubt that most of us, my friends and peers, already know how to program, and in fact, are excellent at it. But how did we get here? More importantly, how would we teach others to get there? (Is the unexamined life worth living?)
That is the question with which I was obsessed for months and months. My answer to the question is to re-learn how to program. HTDP is how I’m going to do it. If you are interested too, please have a look at:
http://www.htdp.org/
Let us begin!
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When I was first learning about Functional Programming and Scheme, the idea that order-of-execution didn’t matter in purely functional programs, was “strange to me”, to put it nicely. When I first read about Scheme’s begin form, for example, I remember feeling satisfied that Scheme wasn’t totally insane as it had at least
Continue reading “Sequencing in Scheme”
‘LAMBDA: The Ultimate GOTO’ (found here) is a paper that was written in 1977 by Guy Steele. It is fun to read, informative, and accessible to a wide-variety of programmers and interest levels. Here are some interesting bits about the paper (I will leave the detail to the paper, no sense in trying to re-state what Steele has already done so well):
(All bits are either copy-and-paste, or summaries directly from the referenced text, along with my comments)