programming musings

Here’s a list of (mostly) scheme video lectures, based on the links posted in this thread of the PLT mailing list, with some extra bits taken from my own collection:

• SICP lectures by Abelson and Sussman (see also here for more lightweight versions), still my all-time favourite lecture series on any field.
• Also based on SICP, Brian Harvey’s course on UCB is quite fun (and, while you’re at it, you may find interesting other UCB courses too). And the ADU course comes with lots of additional notes and materials, although i’ve only skimmed over it and i don’t really know how good it is. But let me tell you that, if it’s as good as Shai Simonson‘s course on Theory of computation, it’s probably worth your time.
• All videos from this year’s ICFP are available online. Among them, one can find Jay McCarthy’s talk on RESTful webapps in Scheme using serializable continuations; Matthew Flatt on PLT’s Scribble documentation system; Matthias Felleisen on how he and his collaborators are using purely functional programming for teaching kids and making them have fun; and Ralf Hinze’s La Tour D’Hanoï, which is not about scheme but is a pearl anyway (as is Ryan Newton’s report on how he used functional programming to implement an embedded bird detector via a parallel DSL with some metaprogramming for a good measure).
• During the latest GNU Hackers meeting, Andy Wingo talked about recent developments on Guile (bittorrent file).
• Robby Findler on Why macros matter is a little nice introduction on how one can use macros not only in cases that lazy languages handle gracefully, but, more importantly, as a full-fledged language definition device.

• A clip featuring Shriram Khrisnamurthi, where he introduces WeScheme, a pretty interesting scheme-in-a-browser environment based on PLT’s Moby platform, which Shriram presented at the latest ILC; although there’s no video of that talk available, you can get the slides and a sound recording here (as is usually the case with Shriram, definitely worth your time).
• A talk by Matthias Felleisen on the evolution of Northeastern University’s CS curriculum, where scheme plays a central role.

• The DanFest videos, which i’ve mentioned before one or two times. Virtually all lectures in this series are worth watching, but, if Robby’s talk above picked your curiosity, don’t miss Ken Dyvbig’s Macro Writer’s Bill of Rights video and slides.

  
  And i cannot help mentioning neither Gerry Sussman’s The role of programming in the formulation of ideas

  
  (and its accompanying article) nor Oleg Kiselyov’s Normal-order syntax-rules and proving the fix-point of call/cc:

• As an aside, if you like Gerry as much as i do, you might be interested in hearing him sharing his enthusiasm for mechanical watches for a change. Or, if insist staying (more or less) on topic, take a look at his The Legacy of Computer Science, for Gerry’s take on how CS is making us smarter.
• Guy Steele’s Designing by Accident is a very interesting history on how Scheme came to life and its relationship with actors:

  
  for which you’ll need the accompanying slides. Although not specifically about Scheme, Steele’s Growing a language is also a must see.

• You will have to tell me how good Matthiew Flatt’s Processes without partitions is, because it seems to be available only in formats that i cannot play on debian.
• In The 90 minute Scheme to C compiler talk Mark Feeley shows how closure conversion and CPS can be used to put together a Scheme compiler (ninety minutes being the time needed to explain it, mind you).

• Those of you new to scheme and functional programming may enjoy this lecture by Jerry Cain, pertaining to Stanford’s course on Programming Paradigms, which discusses functional programming using Kawa scheme. Not stellar, but not bad as an introduction.

• Finally (for now), some fun livecoding with Fluxus:

  
  And don’t miss this gallery for some really beautiful ones.