
Lisp Hackers: Peter Seibel - mark_h
http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/lisp-hackers-peter-seibel.html
======
spacemanaki
I'd love a book on statistics for programmers written by Peter Seibel. I know
there's Think Stats, and that's a pretty good book, but I'd be interested in a
Lisper's take. PCL and Coders at Work are really great.

~~~
mahmud
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 :-)

~~~
calibraxis
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>)

~~~
mjw
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!

~~~
apgwoz
Woah! Does this exist in PDF form somewhere?

In fact it does:
[http://www.fisica.net/mecanicaclassica/struture_and_interpre...](http://www.fisica.net/mecanicaclassica/struture_and_interpretation_of_classical_mechanics_by_gerald_jay_sussman.pdf)

~~~
mahmud
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".

------
Graphon
Funny - when looking at a codebase for the first time, I do almost exactly the
same thing as described by Mr Seibel: I start rewriting it. I rename functions
or methods that I think have poorly chosen names, I rename the names of
fields, variables or parameters for the same reason, I refactor, restructure,
and reformat the code to look like I think it should look, and so on.

~~~
spacemanaki
That sounds like it could be really beneficial to understanding a piece of
code, but it seems like it would only ever be really feasible if you were
working alone and taking some code from somewhere else and completely
consuming it, into a new project like Toot and Whistle or into some other
existing project. Most of the times that I've needed to ramp up understanding
of some code is either at a new job or before contributing to some existing
project.

Would you do this after starting at a new job, and make this your first
commit? Or before contributing to open source?

I could envision some awkward social problems arising there. If you kept that
code to yourself, but continued working on the old code, that would probably
be frustrating.

I'm just curious because I'm really attracted to the idea of this method but
am not sure if it would really work where I'd want it to.

~~~
gigamonkey
As I think I mentioned in the interview, I've found that if I do this, by the
time I'm done with my rewrite, I actually understand the original code too. So
if I had to, I could throw away my new (better?) code and still benefit from a
better understanding of the original code.

~~~
agumonkey
Funny, it's a thing I repressed myself doing, always wondering if static
analysis (call graphs and such) wouldn't be better.

<sidenote> There should be a site with a substantial piece of code to discover
and people would answer what were the main (3-5) steps they had to do to
~understand it and how long.

------
abecedarius
_From time to time I imagine a language that lets you write constraints on
your code in the language yourself — kind of like macros but instead of
extending the syntax your compiler understands, they would allow you to extend
the set of things you could say about your code that the compiler would then
understand._

Auditors in E: <http://www.erights.org/elang/kernel/auditors/>

~~~
AutoCorrect
completely off topic, but when I started reading your comment, the 'inner
voice' was C3PO...

------
kinleyd
Great interview. And thanks for the reference to 'Coders at Work'. Greatly
enjoying reading it.

