From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:29:53 BST." References: <052884b8-7a4b-47fb-a96a-7bfc3b0ad196@b25g2000prb.googlegroups.com> <4A9E390C.90809@maht0x0r.net> <20090902163545.76DD15B3E@mail.bitblocks.com> From: Bakul Shah Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 08:57:36 -0700 Message-Id: <20090903155736.335D75B73@mail.bitblocks.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] scheme plan 9 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 61768d12-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:29:53 BST Eris Discordia 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!