Hey, sorry this took me a while to respond to -- I have a script which polls HN to custom-order the posts I see, so I am not often on the main site.
SICM is basically a mainline classical mechanics textbook of the form that I was able to do my Bachelor's in, but combined with some tantalizing snippets of Lisp code which make it seem like there's something deeply interesting there, too. There's a magical feeling where you're like "holy crap if I could nail down the mathematical notation a little more and get some of these routines as efficient library built-ins, this would be like a programming sandbox that could teach a student physics by direct interaction."
SICM is basically a mainline classical mechanics textbook of the form that I was able to do my Bachelor's in, but combined with some tantalizing snippets of Lisp code which make it seem like there's something deeply interesting there, too. There's a magical feeling where you're like "holy crap if I could nail down the mathematical notation a little more and get some of these routines as efficient library built-ins, this would be like a programming sandbox that could teach a student physics by direct interaction."