[SGVLUG] Fwd: MITx is open for enrollment

[Claude Felizardo]

AI languages eh?  I used Smalltalk at a dot-com and at JPL and LISP
was used to extend AutoCAD years ago but I have never had the occasion
to use just Scheme other than in a class.  The "Wizard Book" was after
my time but I still have my "Red Dragon book" somewhere...

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Dustin Laurence
<dllaurence at dslextreme.com> wrote:
> On 02/13/2012 11:50 AM, Joel Witherspoon wrote:
>
>> Something I picked up this morning.
>
>
> Just in case anyone is interested in the course but doesn't doesn't know the
> name, the co-professor for the course, Gerry Sussman, is one of the last
> generation of people who can genuinely be called old-school MIT lisp hackers
> of the same circles that people like Richard Stallman came from (that's
> actually unkind--Sussman is far closer than Stallman to the original Hacker
> ideal, being a powerful theoretician as well as a coder) and at least a
> minor deity in CS circles.  He was a co-author of many famous things: the
> "Lambda the Ultimate" series of papers, the Scheme programming language, the
> "Wizard Book" (The Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs), and
> so on.
>
> I didn't know he had hardware interests, but it doesn't surprise me a bit,
> as he seems to be something of a renaissance man in terms of breadth without
> being shallow.  He visited Caltech and hung out with the general relativity
> people once just to see what their computational problems were (I think his
> interest was in the fully relativistic fluid dynamics problem that was going
> to be a Grand Challenge item, though I might have the precise time-frame
> wrong).  He seemed to have enough physics and mathematics to hold up his end
> of the conversation with people who think that differential geometry is
> kindergarten math.  That really impressed me later when I thought about it,
> because most CS professors don't seem to have a powerful command of
> continuous mathematics.
>
> What I'm trying to say is that what he has to say is worth listening to
> regardless of the subject.
>
> Taking this course would be a really great study group effort for a
> hackerspace or a LUG with a lot of hardware interests.
>
> Dustin