
MIT Lisp lecture from '86. wow. - gregp
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5546836985338782440&q=google+lectures&total=7924&start=10&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
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tlrobinson
The whole series of SICP lectures is online:

[http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-
lec...](http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/)

They're pretty awesome.

~~~
Hexstream
If I only read the book and don't watch the lectures will I be missing much?

~~~
kmt
It's entertaining to watch them.

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aston
Gerry Sussman... Good piece of trivia: In addition to creating the class, he
taught the last (ever) offering of 6.001 last term at MIT.

Another piece of trivia: Hal Abelson, the co-creator, was one of the big guys
being 6.001's replacement (now in Python).

~~~
kflasch
With all of the excitement I see online about SICP and Lisp/Scheme, do you (or
anyone else) know why they are transitioning away from the book and Scheme?

~~~
aston
You may have missed the other excitement online about schools changing their
computer science programs to make them more attractive to students. MIT's not
really ratcheting down the difficulty, but starting off everyone in Scheme was
really off-putting to a number of students.

The new intro classes are in Python, which you could argue has the immediate
benefit of being used in the world outside of MIT. They're also now more
focused on learning while working towards project-style goals (like building a
robot) instead of towards academic goals (like getting Scheme to do OOP).

Personally, I loved 6.001, but I'm the first to admit it was not for everyone,
even people who could become great coders.

~~~
jimbokun
"The new intro classes are in Python, which you could argue has the immediate
benefit of being used in the world outside of MIT."

Yep. They can tell incoming freshmen they can use Python when they get a job
at Google. Something that was not true of Scheme.

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brlewis
I took 6.001 in Spring '87. I loved it, aside from the slow computers in the
lab. I pulled an all-nighter on a Saturday for a problem set not due until
Thursday so as to avoid the crowds.

After the class was over I didn't use Scheme for another 10 years, but did
everything in C. Scheme was just too slow in 1987. Both the language
implementations and the hardware have come a long way. I use Scheme all the
time now, and there are numerous popular languages, notably PHP and Ruby, that
are slower than Scheme today.

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kmt
It surprises me that people didn't know about these lectures already (of
course I realize there's always a first time). They are considered classic and
anyone interested in lisp (and programming in general) should watch them.

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mrtron
Imagine being able to re-watch your lectures online when studying for an
exam...that would be great.

It is fantastic that such lectures are being put online for the use of anyone.

~~~
kmt
Imagine being unprivileged enough to be born in a third-world country and not
even have a chance to pay your application fee for higher education. If you're
bright enough and have Internet access you can still learn from the best and
maybe prepare yourself and earn a scholarship in the future.

~~~
eru
You can take a very broad definiton of 'third-world country' and this is still
true.

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iamwil
I was surprised to see the equivalent of a powerpoint in '86. It's weird to
see the same ideas that we have now, but implemented in an older technology.
Kinda like when you watch the mother of all demos.

I can see why old-timers think nothing's changed in the past couple decades
sometimes.

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anaphoric
Nice lecture... I am sending it on to my students.

But did anyone get a load of that old lisp machine? You could just feel how
sluggish it must have been :-)

20 years on and things are much snappier! Thanks Intel and AMD!

------
__
The book that goes with this course, _Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs_ , is excellent. It's available online:

<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html>

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ptn
All the Intro to CS classes start the same: the teacher writes COMPUTER
SCIENCE in the board and then says 'this is not a science and it is not about
computers' and crosses them out.

~~~
pchristensen
Where do you think it came from?

~~~
eru
Murray's Rule: Any country with "democratic" in the title isn't.

The same is true of 'sciences'.

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sanj
Whatever happened to the Java years of 6.001?

Anyone here take them?

I still look back fondly on how '001 blew my mind lecture after lecture.

~~~
mdakin
I took 6.001 in the spring of 1997 and we did the simple "Decaf Java"
interpreter (in Scheme). Decaf Java is an s-exp representation of a Java
program's parse tree. It is foggy and distant now but I believe we did do a
problem set in actual Java and then later in the semester after doing the
Scheme in Scheme metacircular evaluator we did the Decaf Java interpreter. I
don't have any other 6.001 experience to compare it to but I loved the version
I took.

