The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) prizes.
Anyone looking for programming fodder might have fun applying their current language of study to Netflix’s problem and massive data [...]
When I was first learning about Functional Programming and Scheme, the idea that order-of-execution didn’t matter in purely functional programs, was “strange to me”, to put it nicely. When I first read about Scheme’s begin form, for example, I remember feeling satisfied that Scheme wasn’t totally insane as it had at least some way [...]
‘LAMBDA: The Ultimate GOTO’ (found here) is a paper that was written in 1977 by Guy Steele. It is fun to read, informative, and accessible to a wide-variety of programmers and interest levels. Here are some interesting bits about the paper (I will leave the detail to the paper, no sense in trying to re-state [...]
‘LAMBDA: The Ultimate Imperative’ (found here) is a paper that was written in 1976 by Guy Steele and Gerry Sussman. It is fun to read, informative, and accessible to a wide-variety of programmers and interest levels. Here are some interesting bits about the paper (I will leave the detail to the paper, no sense in [...]
The Lambda Papers are a series of seminal works on programming language design and implementation written by Guy Steele and Gerry Sussman.
You may have heard about them because of the very popular Lambda the Ultimate website, or maybe you just heard about them because you are studying Scheme, or are a student of programming history. [...]
In the comp.lang.lisp post [Slow Loop (alternatives in lisp?)] Francogrex asked how to implement pivot table functionality without it taking forever using inner loops. Folks posted clearly faster solutions along with good advice. By the way, taking forever means 12 hours for inputs of 1 million data points.
I wondered how you might lead someone down [...]
Codeswarm provides “Organic software visualization of project repositories.”. In other words, you point it at your Subversion repository and it makes really cool movies showing who did what over time. Here is an example of the PLT source tree.
(via PLT)
The First Year? It’s not Scheme.
Matthias Felleisen talks here about his teams approach to first-year courses on programming and computing.
Here is a presentation on the approach. Be sure to read it as there are a lot of interesting bits in there.
(via PLT)
While reading a (now forgotten) comp.lang.lisp post, I saw the publication ACM SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers mentioned. Unfortunately I don’t have access to this part of the digital library (for that you need to be a paying member). Perhaps this is something in to which it is worth looking.
Any time folks are interested in something which [...]
Via IEEE Bios:
Leslie Lamport’s pioneering work in distributed and concurrent algorithms has improved numerous consumer and industrial computing systems. The result of his work can be found in multi-processor technology such as very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) semiconductors and multi-computer networks used in aircraft control systems. Since 2001 he has been at the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Center, [...]