Not dead yet

I have been silent in the blogosphere for the past few months. Life continues to be very busy. The SICP study group is progressing well. I am having a lot of fun interacting with Tom, Pradip, Martin and others. I am close to finishing chapter 2. Almost all the exercises have been completed and tons of things learnt. I wonder how some people find time to do the problems and blog about them.

I also switched to Scheme from Clojure as my language for doing SICP exersizes for many reasons. One important reason is the fact that the purpose of the whole thing is to do SICP and general principles of Computation. I find Scheme to be an excellent vehicle for that purpose. Thinking back, I think it was emacs + slime which was holding me back from trying other alternatives. :-)

And then it happened. I bought ”The Little Schemer” by Dan Friedman and Matthias Felliesen and simply fell in love with it. In my opinion, this little book is a much more important book in computing than the mighty Knuth and K&R. True, they have their place. But this book conveys some of the most important principles in computation in a simple Q&A style. I had a smooth sail through it until I hit the chapter on Y Combinator (aptly titled ”… and again, and again, and again .. “) which I had to read about 4 times and experiment on the repl to finally get it. Reading this book also motivated me to take a serious look at Scheme. I managed to grok some of the fine papers written by Dybvig, Felliesen and the other fine and friendly folks at the PLT. The PLT community and the mailing lists are one of the finest and helpful group of folks I have seen.

I am currently looking at Guile, the FSF’s own Scheme implementation. There are many factors which makes guile interesting. Guile is small, but at the same time good enough to be very useful to write large systems. It has a good C FFI and has a good module system, something I haven’t seen in the other Scheme implementation and is the closest thing to Common Lisp packages, in my opinion. It has a nice VM and a compiler, which is evolving. I hope I can learn a lot more by working with Guile than any other Scheme. Guile is actively being developed by Andy Wingo and others who can also be interacted with at the #guile irc channel, which is great. I use Emacs and geiser to interact with Guile.

Clojure was fun. I will return back to it when I have a need. I almost finished writing a blog engine with it and had a lot of fun writing it. But for now, Scheme definitely serves my needs for learning programming language fundamentals.

At this point, some people in the Clojure community are busy trying to get all the attention they can (and also sell some books, more in the works, so we will see a proliferation of such posts for the next many months) by posting every blog post they find on clojure to HN, Reddit and also repost the HN url back to twitter! The result of all these is that, a lot of people think Clojure is the first Lisp in this planet! I mean.. grow up, people! I am sure, they will settle down. Can’t resist posting this XKCD strip. But overall, over exposure of Clojure is good for all the Lisps.

I have a bunch of books waiting to be read or partially read:

On Lisp (almost finished it, but planning to read again).
The Lambda papers by Steele and Sussman.
To Mock a mockingbird.
PLAI (Shriram Krishnamurthi)
EOPL
PAIP
The Joy of Clojure.
...

Not sure whether a lifetime is enough to read and understand them all and also make something useful for myself and others to use.