RacketCon 14: Keynote presentation #programming #emacs
The keynote presentation at RacketCon 14 was given by Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman of "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"-fame - often the book is just referred to as "SICP", which turned 40 this year.
(I'm sort of ashamed to admit that I never read it, but hey.)
During the questions after the keynote speeches I picked up a set of quotes about Emacs from Sussman:
"If I was starting again, I'm gonna say something nasty, if I was starting again, making the software for SICM, I would probably be using Julia."
"Which is basically a Scheme, with a syntax. I hate syntax, I'd rather use Lisp syntax. But I'd be using Julia, since it's even better at numerical chrunching on very, very large scales."
"Racket is a wonderful thing, but it has one problem for me. It doesn't play well with my most famous and favourite interface in the world, which is Emacs."
"By contrast, I know it does have an Emacs interface, but when I have tried it, it doesn't play well with Emacs. And I live in Emacs. I hardly touch a computer to do anything else than Emacs."
"The real thing I love is Emacs."
The lectures were given remotely, which gave a couple of fun moments reminding me of the Statler & Waldorf Muppet Show videos.
The video ends with a nice surprise gift for the two presenters and authors - check it out - with Abelson telling the surprise party that they are in the middle of a lecture, but do come in and say hello to everybody at the conference.
@blog I read every bit of it, and I found it exceptional. Much of it have come in handy in the 30 years that passed. When schools abandoned it for the fad of the day I really felt they missed the plot. You don't have to plan to use Scheme, or even like Scheme, to learn a tremendous much from that book. While I'm strictly of the statically typed persuasion, for this book, Scheme was a good choice.
- https://chaos.social/users/tommythorn 🕢︎ - 2024-11-04