Lecture 1B | MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation, 1986

I don't think it's possible to do any better than this: link to this video Admittedly, when I found my way to Sussman's course, I had already been programming for awhile, so the "magic" was less of Wow, I can write a computer program that does neat stuff! and more Wow, this makes everything I've been doing so much more clear and simple!

I don't know about "possible to express", but having learned Haskell, I see monoids everywhere. In the SICP lectures, when Sussman teaches the class the word "predicate", he mentions that knowing the names of these things is important because "As any sorcerer will tell you, if you know the name of a spirit, you have power over it".1 If you only know C, you're unlikely to think in terms of map/filter/reduce. If you don't know Haskell, you're unlikely to think in terms of functors and monads. You may be vaguely aware of repeated patterns, but knowing you're looking at a monad gives you a lot more power to reason about it. 1 link to this video

"As any sorcerer will tell you, if you know the name of a spirit, you have power over it" -- Gerry Sussman, SICP * link to this video Many/most of the general population seem to think "propaganda" only happens to other people, somewhere else, under a dictatorship, in Russia or North Korea for example. In contrast, many/most think the TV/media outlets they watch/consume (and most closely identify with) are the real news -- the true/fair/balanced/accurate news -- while the "other news" channels are "extreme" (MSNBC vs FOX NEWS) or "fake" (now ascribed to CNN). It's supposed to be illegal for the USG to use propaganda against its own citizens. Curiously the "Lobbying Restriction" in the US tax code for IR…

Gerald Sussman covers the Tower of Hanoi problem in the SICP lectures 1. The thing I find fascinating about this solution is that it doesn't even require the rule that you can't place larger discs on smaller discs - it simply is never optimal to do so anyway. And the solution is so simple, I wonder if you could invent a game by first coming up with a solution and then seeing what it actually solves. 1 link to this video

"“To know a thing is to name it,” you advise. True names have power. The K language was invented by Ursula K. Le Guin, and is among the oldest and tersest forms of magic." Beautiful. I think the first time I learned the value of knowing the true names of things was here: link to this video before I studied it in depth reading Rothfuss.