I've often dreamed of a "Structure and interpretation" series of books.
Scheme is pretty close to a universal computation substrate that provides enough ergonomics to be human understandable and writing anything out in it provides genuine illumination to what's going on under the hood.
The "little" books are a tease of what that series could be.
fouronnes3•18m ago
I want to write Structure and Interpretation of Geometric Optics. I have an outline already in my notes and I'm convinced that the computing-first approach would benefit the field immensely. I've been learning optics for a while and writing a python library [0]. With a background in software it's very obvious that there is strong SICP vibes in lenses, refraction, etc. I just need someone to trust me and write me a check for 1 or 2 years salary so I can go full bunker mode and write it =)
I didn't get anywhere trying to read this book. Then I watched a youtube video about calculus of variations and suddenly Lagrangian dynamics made total sense to me. I should probably try reading the book again.
arunix•8m ago
Do you remember which video that was?
Schiphol•2h ago
Does anybody know of a way to run the code in this book? I've tried a couple of times but never quite succeeded.
Ah, nice, I'll try that. SICM in particular relies on numerical routines and things for scientific computing that this perhaps doesn't cover. We'll see. Thanks!
Funny that we call it classical. Newton wouldn't have called it so. Maybe we should categorize sciences based on the spatial scale at which they operate.A specific scale might define a world that has it's logic system, purpose, reasoning etc. For example, quantum scale, human scale and cosmic scales have their own physics, logic and causality.
noosphr•2h ago
Scheme is pretty close to a universal computation substrate that provides enough ergonomics to be human understandable and writing anything out in it provides genuine illumination to what's going on under the hood.
The "little" books are a tease of what that series could be.
fouronnes3•18m ago
[0] https://victorpoughon.github.io/torchlensmaker/