In a previous life when I was at MIT, I took a course from Gerry Sussman called Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics [1]. There was one lecture where he taught us Scheme, which is a simple enough language that it can be taught in a lecture. After class I went to his office to ask him a few questions, and I told him I was interested in functional programming.
He printed out some scheme file from his computer and handed it to me. It was a derivation of the Y combinator. He patiently walked me through it and answered my uninformed questions. He was always so enthusiastic about teaching, and his explanations were more like an exuberant performance than a traditional lecture.
Fueled by his contagious passion, I've since learned quite a bit about functional programming and have given many talks on various related topics. My focus is on type systems and machine-checked proofs, which strangely enough Gerry Sussman seemed to loathe. I wish I had spent more time picking his brain while I was there.
If there's one professor I miss from MIT, it's Gerry. He's so knowledgeable about so many different topics, from physics, to formal logic, to neuroscience, to AI, to programming language theory. For some topics, there are certain magic words you can say that will get him going in such a way that you'll wish you'd brought popcorn.
He printed out some scheme file from his computer and handed it to me. It was a derivation of the Y combinator. He patiently walked me through it and answered my uninformed questions. He was always so enthusiastic about teaching, and his explanations were more like an exuberant performance than a traditional lecture.
Fueled by his contagious passion, I've since learned quite a bit about functional programming and have given many talks on various related topics. My focus is on type systems and machine-checked proofs, which strangely enough Gerry Sussman seemed to loathe. I wish I had spent more time picking his brain while I was there.
If there's one professor I miss from MIT, it's Gerry. He's so knowledgeable about so many different topics, from physics, to formal logic, to neuroscience, to AI, to programming language theory. For some topics, there are certain magic words you can say that will get him going in such a way that you'll wish you'd brought popcorn.
[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/sicm-html/bo...