Lecture 1A: Overview and Introduction to Lisp

Not even a second of thought: Sussman's & Abelson's SICP ▶ this video especially the section on streams ( link ) It changed my outook on programming by pi degrees and I feel it is more needed then ever.

It's on-demand on YouTube[1] and an excellent course that is still very much relevant with very high production quality circa 1986. What makes it special is who is teaching it, which is the original authors of SICP. The course thus completely complements their book and is in the same style. The courses from later years are also on YouTube, but they don't feel the same. [1] ▶ this video

The class mentioned in the article was actually made available under Creative Commons by the MIT OpenCourseWare[1], you can see the entirely of the course in Youtube. I watched and cannot recommend it enough, even for seasoned programmers [1]: ▶ this video

The real beauty is in how few operators you need to achieve maximal expressiveness in a programming language. It makes other programming languages seem extra. Highly recommend the SICP lectures ▶ this video

Learn LISP/Scheme and lots of fundamental concepts you probably have a feel for, but in a far more profound way: 1. First watch the SICP series ( ▶ this video ) 2. Then work through the book ( link ) If you really do the exercises (an hour here and an hour there), you can feel you brain getting wrapped around many core notions in very illuminating ways.

There are a lot of good books here: link I second the comment ( link ) recommending How to Design Programs (HTDP) and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). The former has an edX course ( link and link ) and the latter has online lectures ( ▶ this video ) Head First Architecture ( link ) is good. Reading about systems thinking would be useful. Learning programming languages that have been well designed is helpful. I suggest Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World and Elixir in Action .

Here is Harold Abelson discussing the topic in ~1986. His introduction to “Computer Science” has stuck with me for years. Interesting to see the lineage of the statement, it must have stuck with him as it has for me, when he first heard it. ▶ this video

Maybe more of the hype comes from the fact that its a Lisp. To get a feeling for the "magic" of lisp, I would suggest either watching SICP video lecs[0] or reading the book. I started learning lisp, almost the same time I've started learning programming with Java (college). Honestly I was thinking why they don't just teach us that, instead of Java at that time. Also Clojure is created by a fairly respected dude (afaik) Rich Hickey. His talks and Clojure design decision articles on the site are really insightful. Also this talk[1] also pretty good overview of different paradigms and `Clojure way`, imo. [0] ▶ this video [1] link

I’ve included the halting problem, but omitted the Turing machine, because while ingenious, the latter is simply a hack to make proofs work and not a very good way to think about computation. Similarly, I’ve included distributed representations, but omitted backpropagation since while backprop works very well for a number of problems that are otherwise unsolvable today, it is not a particularly enlightening way to write programs. Also, the first 10 minutes of the introductory SICP lecture contains a livelier presentation of the idea in the quote: ▶ this video

The original course videos are on youtube too! I found them a bit easier to watch than reading the book: ▶ this video

That's true. The Harold Ableson GIF of him scratching out the word Science, then the word Computer comes to mind. ▶ this video

As Hal Abelson said back in 1986 in the original SICP lectures [1] while drawing `(+ 3 (* 5 6) 8 2)` and the corresponding syntax tree on the board: >"We're writing these trees ... and parentheses are just a way to write this two dimensional structure as a linear character string. Of course, when LISP first started and people had teletypes or punchcards or whatever and (the parentheses character structure) was more convinient. But maybe if LISP started today the syntax would look more like (a 2D syntax tree)." [1]: ▶ this video