Re: [9fans] scheme plan 9

[Bakul Shah <bakul+plan9@bitblocks.com>]

On Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:29:53 BST Eris Discordia <eris.discordia@gmail.com>  wrote:
>
> I mean, I never got past SICP Chapter 1 because that first chapter got me
> asking, "why this much hassle?"

May be you had an impedance mismatch with SICP?

> P.S. I'm leaving. You may now remove your
> arts-and-letters-cootie-protection suits and go back to normal tech-savvy
> attire ;-)

This may not be your cup of tea or be artsy enough for you
but check out what happens when tech meets arts:

    http://impromptu.moso.com.au/gallery.html

Start the first video; may be skip the first 3 minutes or
so but after that stay with it for a few minutes.  The author
is creating music by *coding* in real time (and doing a great
job!).  He uses Impromptu, a Scheme programming environment,
that supports realtime scheduling and low level sound
synthesis. Given Scheme one can then build arbitrarily
complex signal processing graphs.

For some subset of people this sort of thing just might be a
better introduction to programming than SICP. Basically
anything that allows them to do fun things with programming
and leaves them wanting more.

BTW, you too can download impromptu on OS X and synthesise
your own noize!