SICP vs The Necronomicon
| Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs | The Necronomicon | |
|---|---|---|
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 |
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| Author | Abelson & Sussman | "The Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred |
| Published | 1984 | 730 A.D |
| Also known as | The Wizard Book, The Purple Book | Al Azif, The Book of Dead Names |
| Found in the library at | MIT | Miskatonic U |
| Dedicated to | The spirit that lives in the machine | The Great Old Ones |
| Contents | Abstraction, recursion, interpreters and metalinguistic abstraction | Certain ideographs linked with the most blood-curdling and blasphemous whispers of things that had had a kind of mad half-existence before the earth. |
| Quotes | "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." | "That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die." |
| "Introducing assignment into our programming language leads us into a thicket of difficult conceptual issues." | "Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl." | |
| "The evaluator, which determines the meaning of expressions in a programming language, is just another program." | "Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate." | |
(define (map proc items)
(if (null? items)
nil
(cons (proc (car items))
(map proc (cdr items))))) |
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." | |
| Critics say | "It changed the way I think about my profession." -- Peter Norvig | "Reading leads to terrible consequences." -- HP Lovecraft |
| Further reading | Lisp in Small Pieces, Essentials of Programming Languages | De Vermis Mysteriis, Unaussprechlichen Kulten |
SICP is an excellent computer science text and one of the bibles of the Lisp / Scheme world.
The Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire that appears in horror writer HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.
Per Jacobsson, June 2010