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Comment by mattkellyshow | Hacker News Reader

A really moving and inspirational quote from the opening of SICP:

"A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform."

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More than anything else, that paragraph is what kept me coming back when I first started learning to program and struggled mightily. I lugged that huge book around in my book bag for months, trying and failing to fully grok one of the earlier chapters, until I found a professor who was willing to help me with it. Ultimately we (the professor and I) were able to do a one semester independent study focusing on the material from SICP.

I used to read and re-read that paragraph. I read it aloud to my parents and to girlfriends, trying to find somebody to share my awe.

Sometimes it is hard to find others who share an appreciation of the beauty of mathemtics or computing. People look at me funny when I say programming is every bit as much an art as writing a poem. Almost any human activity can be an art.

> writing a poem

On that analogy, Lisp is like French. Other languages are like German.

(And before you downvote me please note: I am a native German speaker.)

That's funny because I am a native French speaker and I find German to be a very pleasing language to speak out loud. The sonorities are oddly satisfying to me.

Please note that I am nowhere near fluent in German. It just feels great, especially the way words can agglutinate to form comically long words, while still transporting meaning.

I don't dispute any of that. But French is still a better language for writing poetry (IMHO).

I see. I kinda mixed up poetry and beauty.

Les mathématiciens sont comme les Français: quoiqu'on leur dise, ils le traduisent dans leur propre langue, et cela devient alors quelque chose de complètement différent. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Incorrect; a computational process is made of matter/energy.

It has an conceptual interpretation of what it's doing; what it represents. That is what is intangible.

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