We're Still Around! A 5 Year Update

By Erik

TL;DR: We’re still alive, we read lots of stuff, and we’re starting The Seasoned Schemer soon.

We still exist! After finding out that a few of our friends only found us because of our web presence, I figured it was time to update the site with all the stuff we’ve been up to in the last 5 years.

Myself and a new group of folks who weren’t around for the original reading of SICP decided to spin off a group on Thursdays and work our way through it, and kept going after that book was done. We alternated between books / courses and shorter papers to give ouselves a break between longer readings, some highlights are listed below:

• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System by Leslie Lamport
• The Byzantine Generals Problem, again by Lamport et al.
• Out of the Tarpit, Mosely, Marks
• Pursue Robust Indefinite Scalability by David Ackley.
  • David actually joined us that day and was happy to hear about how other people interpreted his work without speaking up until later in the conversation, so I had the pleasure of presenting his own paper back to him. It was nerve-wracking, but wonderful to have him along and I think we all learned a lot.
• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
  • This one made a number of us go down various note-taking / Zettelkasten rabbit-holes for months, experimenting with various note platforms and pesonal wikis. (I personally settled on Logseq)
• An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming by Hoare
• Communicating Sequential Processes again by Hoare
• Penrose: From Mathematical Notation to Beautiful Diagrams by Ye et al.
• Statecharts: a Visual Formalism for Complex Systems* by David Harel
• On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science by Dijkstra

In a bit of a departure from our usual CS or CS-adjacent topics, we spent a few months going through a big chunk of the MIT Underactuated Robotics course.

In the meantime, the Friday version of the reading group was still going strong reading papers, Paradigms of AI Programming by Norvig, and plenty of other stuff I can’t remember (I’ll try to get someone to post a second update, but some of it is listed here). The two groups joined forced around this time and started working through PLFA, possibly the densest book we’ve attempted to date?

After those, we jumped back into some papers:

• The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 by Long Tien Nguyen, Alan Kay
• Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style? by John Backus
• μKanren: A Minimal Functional Core for Relational Programming by Hemann, Freidman
• Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects by Warth, Ohshima, Kaehler, Kay

We then jumped into The Little Schemer with plans to read through the entire “Little” series with some breaks for more papers in between. We’ve just finished up that book and are working our way through another block of papers before we start The Seasoned Schemer:

• A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection by Bacon
  • This choice of paper was inspired by a Sigbovik paper a few of us submitted, the paper and the presentation can be found over at orca.garden
• The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Gabriel
• Packrat Parsing: Simple, Powerful, Lazy, Linear Time by Ford
• David, our resident CRDT expert gave us all a CRDT tutorial and showed off some of his work. We also read:
  • A Highly-Available Move Operation for Replicated Trees by Kleppmann et al.

Today we read Adding Interactive Visual Syntax to Textual Code by Anderson et al., and next week we have Go Meta! A Case for Generative Programming and DSLs in Performance Critical Systems by Rompf et al. lined up.

Then we’ll be onto The Seasoned Schemer! If this seems interesting to you and you’re in the GTA (or not, we’ve been meeting remotely since COVID started), feel free to reach out. Hopefully it won’t be 5 years until the next update - we’ll try to post some more thoughts on what we’re reading instead of just dumping a long list of books and papers in the future.

Erik