Re: Books, books, and then... some books

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH) Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

I've never really been able to use newsgroups with
satisfaction(clients mostly) but now that I have Thunderbird installed
and configured I will definitely see that I subscribe now to
comp.lang.lisp. As for GCL, my attraction to it was the "as fast as C"
claims and the FFI. SBCL and CMUCL are great and like you said much
further ahead. Agree 100% on Peter Seibel's book. I've been watching
the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures
with Sussman and Abelson, that is keen stuff I must say... really
fantastically keen. I don't know why public schools here in the US
don't know about these... if they did I might have actually passed the
computing class in middle school instead of figuring out ways to run
Wolfenstein.

The lectures are found here:
http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/

The Prolog stuff sounds fascinating, I will have to investigate!

As for the grandparent, this might be it:
http://wearables.blu.org/wear-hard-05/2005249.html

Just took a look at my book list again, added a whole mess of calculus
and beyond books and my total has soared to something around
900USD(Amazon wants to put me in the poor house)... I wonder if I need
those books on complex analysis... I just want to be able to read and
understand the work coming out of the EyeTap Personal Imaging Lab and
be competent enough that taking on my own vision and image processing
projects won't be impossible. I fear overspecialization will slow down
my work so I'm quickly having second thoughts about a lot of these
math books. I'm procrastinating on a much grander book list including
my new math interests, so, I'm likely to revisit this topic later if
anyone is also interested in image processing.

That tablet does look nice, a bit pricey though; have you seen Fujitsu's P1=
000?
I can't wait until nanoITX and the VIA LUKE platform become available
this year...
http://www.mini-itx.com/news/11544953

Cheers.

On 7/10/05, Paul-V Khuong <> wrote:
> --- DLP <> wrote:
> [Replying to this message since I can't seem to find
> the grand-parent]
> > > At 03:40 PM 6/23/05, DLP wrote:
> > >
> > > >At first and probably for a long while various
> > > >implementations and
> > > >dialects inspired of Common Lisp will hold my
> > attention,
> > > >but in a year
> > > >or two perhaps I may feel brave enough to let go
> > long
> > > >enough to take
> > > >up another language. :-)
> > > >My fascination with Common Lisp comes from the
> > fact that it's
> > > >implementations are often if not always
> > programmable
> > > >programming
> > > >languages(as the motto goes).
> > > >
> > > >Prolog is also interesting, and I understand a
> > great deal
> > > >of work has
> > > >been done using Prolog so being able to
> > understand it well
> > > >would
> > > >definately help me to read any works which I can
> > learn
> > > >something from.
> > > >
> > > >Though, all that said, I will probably stick
> > mostly to
> > > >something like
> > > >GNU Common Lisp. Im definately open however to
> > any
> > > >suggestions :-D
> As a CLer, I have several suggestions:
> 1. start reading comp.lang.lisp and hanging around in
> # if you're not already.
>=20
> 2. If you're looking for a good intro to CL,
> "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel is very good
> (Dead Tree or at http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/). It
> doesn't teach programming in a general sense (for
> that, I'd go with, for example, David S Touretzky's
> "Common Lisp: Gentle Introduction to Symbolic
> Computation", which is out of print, but still
> available at his webpage
> http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/).
>=20
> 3. GCL isn't quite as mature as either SBCL
> (http://www.sbcl.org) or CMUCL
> (http://cmucl.cons.org), which are both FOSS too. The
> only advantage I can see for going with GCL is that it
> runs with mingw on windows and that it can generate
> smaller cores for distribution. That's probably not
> relevant for a wearable (we're looking at ~20 MB for a
> core at most, anyway).
>=20
> 4. There already are Prolog engines in Lisp. Peter
> Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence
> Programming demonstrates a small prototype, AllegroCL
> (commercial vendor) comes with their own
> implementation, and there is currently a small group
> of people (~1-3, I'm not sure) working on parsing
> Prolog syntax itself in addition to working on an
> engine (the other engines only grok a lispy, READable
> Prolog syntax).
>=20
> 5. RETE is a rule-based reasoning algorithm has been
> implemented in CL (http://lisa.sourceforge.net/ for
> example). Again this is relatively mature (given that
> earlier industry-standard implementations were also
> often based on CL ;).
>=20
> Well, anyway, good luck with your project, whatever it
> may be! (I still can't find the parent or the
> grand-parent) I hope you will these pointers useful.
>=20
> Ob-hardware-comment: What do you think of Motion
> Computing's LS800
> http://www.motioncomputing.com/products/tablet_pc_ls.asp.
> A small, full-blown slate tablet pc (8.94" by 6.69" by
> 0.87", 2.2 pounds), with 802.11a/b/g and BT for 1.9k
> USD is nothing to scoff at :). Just a Zaurus + the
> equipment to give it VGA-out, BT and/or 802.11 and
> maybe USB [1.1, and not 2] (depending on the model) is
> already in ~1k. Of course, the computational power and
> storage capabilities aren,t comparable, and nor is the
> battery life... This doesn't seem like such a bad
> option, especially once it'll have dropped in price in
> a couple months.
>=20
> Paul Khuong
>=20
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