Hello, I havent updated this blog in a while.

But that was compeletely intentional.

Well, the plan (at first) was, after resuming my SICP trek, to comment on the book as I read through it, but when I started, I quickly realized that making a blog post for every interesting idea would undermine my promise to myself by:

• Extending the duration of the reading of the book.
• Distracting me from the content of the book, such that the context switching time would be too long to be worth the trouble.

However, going through the book and not actually thinking about the topics at hand felt like a waste of learning material, so I did the next best thing, which is to try and document my solutions very well, and to commit often and on all filesaves such that not only I’d have a github repository in the end that contained the final answers, but also the intermediate failing attempts so I could at least know what I did wrong.

I tried my best to abide by this, I think its a good thought, but it didn’t work very well. Because I’d find a mistake and quickly try something else iteratively until something worked amnd then I would push the answer to github.

Still, sometimes I did respect this convention. And even when I didn’t, I made sure to document my solution adequately.

All of this will help me in producing a final review for the absolute masterpiece that is this book.

And I did think quite a bit about the idea I laid out in my latest post, my conclusion is that it is probably going to be feasible given that I am helping myself by doing well documented solution and sometimes well documented, but I am also looking at some neat way to animate some things to see if I can get some pointes across better, but this still remains an idea that I am not investing much in.

Time out

However, I am a bit tired of SICP for now, and I think I would benefit quite a bit from a swift perspective change.

Let my subconscious do a bit of work, hopefully next time I resume the book, I have a bit better understanding of some concepts.

Very brief review of previous content

Since I didn’t leave much blog post at all really(except for commenting on the environment model) I will now say a very VERY brief one liner to summarize my thoughts so far about this book.

Very good, streams are elegant, the first meta-circular-evaluator blew my mind because you basically implemented the material from the environment-model of evaluation, and there is something beautiful about building the evaluator and testing it out and knowing exactly what happens under the hood.

Still find the stratified design strategy dubious, and the structure of the fourth chapter is weird.

It was wonderful, some of the exercices were extremely difficult(?), I still struggle with grokking exactly how the amb evaluator works, I really had my eyes on that back-ward compatible lazy scheme, and I KNOW I’m going to do that exercice sometime, but I’ll leave it for later.

Next steps

So, I am taking a break from SICP, what will I replace it with you ask? Well, as per my promise, Haskell of course!

Haskell programming from First Principles. here I come.