The new book is out!
Strategies for building systems that can be adapted for new situations with only minor programming modifications.
Time pressures encourage programmers to write code that works well for a narrow purpose, with no room to grow. But the best systems are evolvable; they can be adapted for new situations by adding code, rather than changing the existing code. The authors describe techniques they have found effective—over their combined 100-plus years of programming experience—that will help programmers avoid programming themselves into corners.
The authors explore ways to enhance flexibility by:
• Organizing systems using combinators to compose mix-and-match parts, ranging from small functions to whole arithmetics, with standardized interfaces
• Augmenting data with independent annotation layers, such as units of measurement or provenance
• Combining independent pieces of partial information using unification or propagation
• Separating control structure from problem domain with domain models, rule systems and pattern matching, propagation, and dependency-directed backtracking
• Extending the programming language, using dynamically extensible evaluators
Some of the techniques, such as dynamically extensible generic procedures, are extremely powerful but potentially dangerous. Each chapter includes exercises. Code is written in Scheme, a simple dialect of Lisp. Examples range from astronomy to automatic differentiation to an adventure game.
This is *not* a SICP rehash.
The book was written with the intent of being used in his 6.945 course, "Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming", which features ancient black magic techniques not previously found in SICP!
If you'd like a taste on some of the topics covered (Sussmans ideology on flexible systems, as well as touching upon dynamically extending evaluators and generic procedures), you can (if you haven't already), watch his 2011 talk, "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI
And of course, much credit is due to Chris Hanson for also authoring the book and maintaining Mit-Scheme for all these years.
Places to buy:
MIT-Press
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility
Am*zon
https://www.amazon.com/Software-Design-Flexibility-Programming-Yourself/dp/0262045494/
Library Genesis
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=85B018F03EADF1F8BA64C12044CF6F19
Well /prog/ , this is the place to discuss your thoughts and journey through this book, so..
Discuss!