Re:Annotated Version of John McCarthy’s Paper on Lisp
by vzaliva on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @05:54PM
(#10503328)
I was looking forward to reading insightful comments on this seminal paper. However I was disappointed by overall quality of the current annotations. Many are about how it translates to Clojure syntax (why not Common LISP or Scheme?). Others are trivialities like "apply and eval are the Maxwell's equations of lisp." I think fermatslibrary.com is a great idea, but this particular example does not do it justice.
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Re:Annotated Version of John McCarthy’s Paper on Lisp
by karamazov on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @06:21PM
(#10503462)
My goal was to make the paper more approachable for people not comfortable with formal mathematics. I think the insight comes from understanding the paper directly.
Do you have an example of a comment, on this or another paper, that you found insightful?
Re:Annotated Version of John McCarthy’s Paper on Lisp
by aiokos on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @06:09PM
(#10503399)
I agree. The Clojure syntax comparisons are probably due to the popularity of that language, compared to Scheme or other Lisp dialects. Perhaps a comment section in addition to the annotations would provide more insightful discussions.
Re:Annotated Version of John McCarthy’s Paper on Lisp
by pjmlp on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @03:11AM
(#10505195)
Yeah to many of us old timers, it feels strange when new FP afficionados only know about Clojure and Haskell like languages, without realising that we already were doing FP for a few generations even if the languages never became mainstream.
On the other hand, it is great that those people jump in with their new ideas and help the community go forward.