William C. Wake's Blog: February 2006 Archive

Posted by wwake on February 15, 2006 at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Somebody at MIT was nice enough to make available the videos for lectures on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson and Sussman.

It's a refresher in just how powerful Lisp is. For a language approaching 50 years old, it's pretty amazing.

I always crack up a little when I think about the reasons Lisp and Smalltalk couldn't go "mainstream" - why, they use too many resources! (My web browser looks like it's running in 41 meg so I can type into a non-styled text box. I doubt Lisp or Smalltalk would do worse than that:)

Anyway, if you've never studied Lisp, these lectuers are a good excuse for trying it out.

The last telegram

Posted by wwake on February 08, 2006 at 04:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I saw a note in the paper that Western Union has sent their last telegram, shutting down a 150-year-old business. Wish I'd known it was coming, I'd have sent "What hath God wrought?" to several people. (I know they just added "@" to Morse code a couple years ago... figured it would be around forever.)

The book The Victorian Internet provides an interesting and readable history of the telegraph.

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