"Conjure our spirits in a magical language called Lisp"

Even the first 10 minutes of the 1st lecture of the MIT lectures on "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" is amazing.

"In Computer Science, we're in the business of formalizing 'how to' imperative knowledge" aka "process."

In the first 5 minutes, I've already implemented my own square root function, which works surprisingly well:

class Program {
  static double MySquareRoot(double x) {
    double margin = 0.10;
    double g = x / 2.0;
    while( System.Math.Abs(g * g - x) > margin ) {
      g = (g + x / g) / 2.0;
    }
    return g;
  }

  static void Main(string[] args) {
    double x = 44523.0;
    System.Console.WriteLine("sqrt({0})= {1}", x, System.Math.Sqrt(x));
    System.Console.WriteLine("MySquareRoot({0})= {1}", x, MySquareRoot(x));
  }
}

I can't possibly believe that I would've understood the implications of the lecture as a freshman, but now, it's like Moses and the stone tablets. Priceless.

[via Joel Spolsky]

I read that article too and watched the first lecture. Very interesting stuff, it's just too bad it takes forever to download. MWV is good IMO. :-)

Very cool indeed, it forced me to write this in c#.

http://blogs.tamtam.nl/paulb/2006/01/02/AHorribleWayToCalculateASquareroot.aspx

It would appear that everyone and their cube-mate was downloading those vids over the weekend. The server was trashed. After repeatedly trying I was able to get all but the last 4 lectures - maybe I'll pick them up tonight.

Anyone know if they've been mirrored somewhere? I tried searching for a bitorrent but the only one I found didn't seem to work either.

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