News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Lisp Hackers: Peter Seibel by mahmud on Monday July 02, 2012 @12:30AM (#4187323)
what makes a lisper better at statistics teaching and exposition than a non-lisper? (say, a trained maths educator?)

fwiw, creators of R are Lisp weenies, so you might wanna look there more carefully :-)

Re:Lisp Hackers: Peter Seibel by calibraxis on Monday July 02, 2012 @03:34AM (#4187777)
I actually have the same feeling as the previous poster. I'd buy/kickstart his stats book in a heartbeat. I don't think Lisp users would be "better" at teaching stats in some objective sense, but many of them (not all) have a certain turn of mind which looks like "clarity" through my subjective lens.

It is probably like Michael Spivak writing _Physics for Mathematicians_, because he didn't understand physics books written by physics people. PDF where he explains his troubles with elementary physics: (http://www.math.uga.edu/~shifrin/Spivak_physics.pdf)

Re:Lisp Hackers: Peter Seibel by mjw on Monday July 02, 2012 @04:40AM (#4187968)
Combining the above with the original comment, check out Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicm/

Physics explained by lispers! using consistent notation!

Re:Lisp Hackers: Peter Seibel by apgwoz on Monday July 02, 2012 @09:19AM (#4188715)
Woah! Does this exist in PDF form somewhere?

In fact it does: http://www.fisica.net/mecanicaclassica/struture_and_interpre...

Re:Lisp Hackers: Peter Seibel by mahmud on Tuesday July 03, 2012 @03:10AM (#4192916)
I also loved the Berkeley book, Structure and Interpretation of Signals and Systems. Went down well with a 5 week daily diet of "Thinking in Systems: A Primer".
Re:Lisp Hackers: Peter Seibel by spacemanaki on Monday July 02, 2012 @08:54AM (#4188624)
> what makes a lisper better at statistics teaching and exposition than a non-lisper? (say, a trained maths educator?)

Nothing really, but I think the code portions of a book like that might be interesting. Allen Downey's book has a bit too much layering of OOP for the sake of OOP for my taste. Check it out if you haven't, he builds up classes for most things where simpler data structures could be used, and ends up wrapping everything in what's effectively a custom API.