Shame on me... I have been super busy with my new gig. So I finished my independent study on SICP and got my grade back... A boo ya. I turned in a ton of work and it has been a very enlightening and worth while exercise. I really enjoyed working through SICP and STPL. I have not been doing any Lisp stuff since late-April. I will be focusing much ( Read more... )

My friend and colleague Philipp K. Janert is writing a book on gnuplot. I am a technical reviewer and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience so far.


( Read more... )

It's interesting how proper tail recursion is such a subtle and deep feature that is easy to get wrong in a language. Many languages don't support it, such as Java, and so you don't miss it if you don't have it ( Read more... )

SICP 5.1 - 5.3 have been really fun and really insane. Writing assembly code is really addictive, but at the same time like serving prison time. You really appreciate how closely the C programming language really is just an improved assembly. Having to think in such linear chunks, manage registers, and the state of the stack is t-e-d-i-o-u-s ( Read more... )

Mac OS X Leopard breaks SICP.pdf. So I just upgraded to 10.5 and now I can't use Preview's search to find specific snippets of code in the SICP book. This is a bummer, as I typically jump around the pdf cross referencing different parts of the book.

I download Adobe's Reader 8 and it does find things like (assign new-cdrs correctly, so oddly ( Read more... )

I am most of the way through the exercises in Chapter 4, but am totally stalling on finishing. For some yak shaving goodness, I thought I would document the Query system and all the layers on top of Scheme which are need to implement this.

PLT Streams code is originally by Berthold K.P. Horn for 2007 class

I am starting from the bottom up... ( Read more... )

SICP Lecture 7B makes a great point during the second Q&A session about solving modularity and abstraction problems by reorganizing a solution around PGEN which parametrizes a general algorithm for a specific input ( Read more... )

So I finished Section 3.4 on concurrency. Sorry no posts for 2.3 - 3.4. Study group has been going well and I have been playing with Scheme instead of writing summaries here... Doh!

An example:
Implementing a backtracking stategy in Scheme:

(define matrix ( Read more... )

So I am still on pace with Reading SICP and doing exercises, but haven't really had time to update this blog with ruminations.

I find the text a much deeper wading into Lisp and computational processes, which is what I needed after reading the Lisp Tutorial and the Little Schemer books ( Read more... )

Today I played around with three testing frameworks for PLT DrScheme.

SRFI-78 "check.ss", SRFI-64 "testing.ss", and lastly SchemeUnit "test.ss".

I started with SRFI-78 since it was a more recent standard. It has a very minimal API.
(require (lib "check.ss" "srfi" "78"))
(check-set-mode! 'report-failed ) ;report-failed)
(load "image-filters.scm")
(check ( ( Read more... )