William Byrd on “The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written“ [PWL NYC]

Meetup: Audio: Sponsored and hosted by Two Sigma (@twosigma) and Chartbeat (@Chartbeat) Description ------------------ William E. Byrd “explores what he considers to be the most beautiful program ever written---a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp---and a few of the many amazing ideas related to this metacircular interpreter.“ References - The Little Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen - Essentials of Programming Languages by Daniel P. Friedman and Mitchell Wand - John McCarthy’s Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I - LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual by John McCarthy, Paul W. Abrahams, Daniel J. Edwards, Timothy P. Hart and Michael I. Levin (see especially page 13!) - John McCarthy’s A micro-manual for LISP - not the whole truth - “Maxwell’s equations of software“ examined by Ken Shirriff - Lisp as the Maxwell’s equations of software by Michael Nielsen - miniKanren, live and untagged: quine generation via relational interpreters (programming pearl) by William E. Byrd, Eric Holk, and Daniel P. Friedman - The Reflective Language Black by Asai, Kenichi - Programming Should Eat Itself by Nada Amin, Strange Loop, 2014 Bio ----- William E. Byrd (@webyrd) is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. He is co-author of ’The Reasoned Schemer’, and is co-designer of the miniKanren relational programming language. He loves StarCraft (BW & SC2). Ask him about the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) he is building.