After reading the posts about 60 year old Prius drivers on bikes and now seeing programming in binary, and languages I haven't talked about in years (Can you say "Snobol", "Pascal", "PDP 11/45", "Lisp", and "Basic" (and I don't mean VISUAL))... I can't decide if next week's birthday is a good or a bad thing! But I do still dabble in the ART of programming from time to time, though I'm more of a PM now. But feel free to ask the question!
LISP. Oh man. I took a semester in a language that's a dialect of LISP called Scheme. Wth?! I never really got it. I mean seriously, (CDR) this and (CADR) that. Huh?? And something to do with Lambda Calculus. :blink: It didn't help that: 1) the professor wrote the book we were using, and 2) the professor spoke almost exclusively in code during class. I'm sure he made it more difficult than it needed to be. Pascal, on the other hand, now that's a different story. Specifically, Borland's Turbo Pascal circa 1992 was my PC language of choice.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(TonyPSchaefer @ Aug 3 2006, 09:32 AM) [snapback]296900[/snapback]</div> Scheme is the dialect they teach you when you start computer science at MIT. One of the best computer science books ever written was Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (free online here http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) which glides you not into programming details, but the different paradigms of programming: functional, OO, logic programming, rule-based systems, etc. You learn how to abstract and problem solve with this book, not simply learn a programming language. I use ChezScheme in some genetic programming projects I do. Speaking of old theoretical languages, anyone ever use FP?
