We Really Don't Know How to Compute (2011) [video] | Hacker News Reader

We Really Don't Know How to Compute (2011) [video]

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77 pointsrfreytag13 comments

I wanted to see the slides, so I tracked them down: https://github.com/strangeloop/2011-slides/blob/master/Sussm...

Interesting: what is being described is a computational paradigm very similar to traditional hardware description languages (Verilog, SystemVerilog, VHDL, etc)

Briefly glancing through the slides, this appears to be based on the work in "The Art of the Propagator" by Alexey Radul and Gerald Jay Sussman.

[PDF] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/44215/MIT-CSA...

See also the recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405183

Discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3163473

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820118

I could listen to Sussman talk about computers for days.

I’m jealous of the kids at MIT who got to be his student.

I feel the exact same way. I really appreciate that he clearly defines concepts, explains the rules and demonstrates with concrete examples of what he is talking about.

Quite a few of his MIT lectures are online, like the SICP lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8FE88AA54363BC46

Oh I know, I’ve watched all of those twice. I adore those lectures. It’s what converted me from a frontend dev dabbling in backend programming into a dedicated programmer ~10yrs ago.

They way they approach programming using Scheme, building complex concepts from nothing like Lego blocks. Plus it contains one of the best explanations of abstraction which is probably the most important and powerful part of programming, that really blew my mind back then. Choosing when and how to balance abstraction in your code is still a daily challenge, even as I’ve matured as a developer, which makes me think back to these lectures often.

I'd love to find videos of lectures done for SICM (Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics). I've been wanting to go through the book (possibly attempting to do the work in Clojure?) for some time.

As someone who is a self taught front-end dev, this comment has peaked my curiosity. I'll now have to give these lectures a listen over the weekend.

piqued

You learn something new every day.

on infoq: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-...

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