Wednesday, 19 May 2010
The Little Schemer
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I just read the first few chapters of The Little Schemer (the first three editions were know as "The Little Lisper"). It's a classic introduction to the Scheme/Lisp language that is written in a very unique style. Instead of lots of long paragraphs of text, it is written in the form of questions and answers (you can find an example chapter on the homepage of the author here). I really like this style, but the opinions are very mixed if you look at the reviews on Amazon. It seems people either love it or hate it, but not much in between.
After only two pages you know what an atom, a list and an s-expression are.
Once those basic building blocks have been introduced, the questions gradually build up, letting you learn about car and cdr (getting the first and all but the first elements of a list), and using those primitives to build other list-manipulating functions.
It's not really a full coverage of Scheme the language, as much as it is an introduction to the programming style and culture that defines Scheme.
A very big part of that culture is recursion, which is the emphasis of the book. Recursion seems to come very natural in Lisp:
solving problems in the same style would be unreadable in more imperative languages like Java, but are a thing of beauty in Lisp.
I had never really gotten the fascination with recursion, finding the examples often more complicated than simple loop-based ones, but I'm starting to come around on that after reading this book.
The minimal syntax of Lisp is definitely something you need to get used to. It seems like something of a wonder to me that you can write full fledged programs using only round brackets :). I still think that it would be painful to read through lengthy programs written in it, since it seems to be harder to quickly see the structure of the program. But it's probably also something that grows on you.
All in all, it's nice to be introduced to something that is so alien compared to what I use in my daily programming. I'm also very surprised to see how high level Lisp is, considering it has been around since 1958, which to someone my age is still the dark ages :).
Posted by at 11:05 PM in Development
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