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by madflame991 3001 days ago
> It changed the way I learn any new programming language.

I can say the same and I can offer my reasons: until this course I saw every language like a little island; after this course I understood that programs are just a collection of features: various typing systems, static/dynamic scoping, lazy/eager evaluation, etc. It's a ton easier to learn a new language by identifying these features than by looking at a language as a big blob. This also made me realize that languages are not little disjoint island - they're overlapping a lot instead.

The course was the way I got into racket and other lisps and this allowed me to read SICP. Since then I've been doing all sorts of toy interpreters/transpilers for fun and it allowed me to get an idea of what's happening behind the scenes in real languages. For example, I used to think that closures are magical, but after implementing them as part of the course they were a piece of cake afterwards. You will get a profound satisfaction when you implement call/cc yourself and suddenly you understand how try/catch or generators work.
2 comments
grdvnl 3001 days ago
I took the same path and went back to reading SICP. But, this time around is was very easy. I had the same experience about implementing closures and the embedded language.
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jamestimmins 3001 days ago
Interesting. Did you feel like you needed a strong understanding of compilers or automata to really grok what was going on (I think automata relate to programming languages, but could be mistaken)?
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madflame991 3001 days ago
None at all. Automata are used to turn a program from its textual form into some manageable data structure that something else will consume (actual interpreter/optimizer/compiler). At some point in the course (in the racket part) you will be asked to implement an interpreter for MUPL (made-up programming language), but the programs are directly written as a data structure - so no need to parse; in racket both data and code look exactly the same - it'll be a breeze.

I think the only requirements for this course is some plain procedural language (C/Pascal).

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