When celebrity programmers attack: Guido on tail calls —
“Almost all non-functional programmers are unaware that tail calls facilitate a programming paradigm that they have never seen. The ability to tail call to functions that are not statically known is the foundation that makes many combinators useful. This is a style of programming where functions are composed in order to create a pipeline for values to flow through. Without tail call elimination, every stage in the pipeline would leak stack space and the whole approach becomes unusably unreliable.”
Extension/Scripting language comparisons - comp.lang.scheme —
“While I do consider the adjective ‘baroque’ to be a compliment, I must point out that Perl is actually more of a romantic piece, with allusions to various classical motifs. My favorite composer is Mahler, which should surprise no one.” — Larry Wall
groups.google.com
15:51
Building Load Resilient Web Servers —
Great look at varnish and concerns around putting a front-end reverse proxy cache in place.
The End of an Era - 6.001 is dead —
Gerry Sussman is teaching this year’s 6.001 SICP class – the last time the class will be offered at MIT. It sounds like Scheme is being phased out of MIT’s CS program completely. What a sad day.
mitadmissions.org
22:43
Lecture 7b: Metacircular Evaluator, Part 2 - Google Video —
“I consider being able to return a procedural value, and to have first class procedures in general, as being essential to doing very good modular programming.” — Gerald Sussman (PS: how come nobody told me you can link to specific time offsets in google
video.google.com
19:01
CS 61A The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs —
UC Berkeley Webcasts | Video and Podcasts: CS 61A.
webcast.berkeley.edu
03:35