Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tsm 3484 days ago
How useful would that really be? PCL has Peter's take on Lisp, and the Joy of Clojure occupies a similar niche if you just want to learn specifically-Clojure.

At one point he mentioned writing a book to the effect of Statistics for Programmers, which sounds intriguing to me. AFAIK it hasn't happened yet, though.

2 comments

> Statistics for Programmers

Why intriguing? The most general family of distributions can only be expressed with a programming language, so there are certainly many connections between both fields.

Incidentally, that's one of my major complaints about Lisp these days. Lisp-Stat started dying in the early 2000s and completely faded away long ago. I read PCL when it was published a decade ago and I fondly remember how enthusiastic I became about Lisp.

I have used Clojure extensively, but the ecosystem for doing math and statistics is quite reduced. The same applies to CL and Scheme. I wish I could use one Lisp for most tasks.

> > At one point he mentioned writing a book to the effect of Statistics for Programmers, which sounds intriguing to me.

> Why intriguing? The most general family of distributions can only be expressed with a programming language, so there are certainly many connections between both fields.

That seems to be an argument for why it is intriguing. Were you perhaps arguing that it wasn't surprising?

R is about as close as it gets (it is quite lispy underneath all the C-like syntax).
Julia and Wolfram as well.
I was thinking about something completely new. I know one can easily (more or less) follow along PCL and do the solutions in Clojure. I just think that Clojure space needs a book like this, with emphasis on practical. I like the practical section in PCL book at the end, where author builds useful little apps and guides you through the thought process. I know about Joy Of Clojure, great book, but it doesn't contain enough toy projects. I think the goal of the book is to help you start thinking functionaly.
I'm working on a book covering parallel and concurrent programming in Clojure, with the style of building abstractions before actually using them. On the topic of Joy of Clojure, as far as I could tell, the book is not meant to be an introduction to the language, rather meant to be read once already familiar. It's helped me internalize concepts I'd picked up through usage.
Sounds interesting. Where do you plan to release your book ?
> I know one can easily (more or less) follow along PCL and do the solutions in Clojure.

Maybe for the first chapter or two, certainly not most of the book. They're very fundamentally different languages.