The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written – watch party and discussion

We're trying something different this month! We're going to watch a popular Papers We Love NYC talk focused on the beauty of Lisp. We'll sync up the talk, run a discussion alongside, and have a synchronous discussion afterwards.

Papers We Love is an international organization centered around the appreciation of computer science research papers. There's so much we can learn from the landmark research that shaped the field and the current studies that are shaping our future. Our goal is to create a community of tech professionals passionate about learning and sharing knowledge. Come join us!

New to research papers? Watch The Refreshingly Rewarding Realm of Research Papers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eRx5Wo3xYA) by Sean Cribbs.

// Tentative Schedule

• 7:00-7:15–Introduction and Announcements

• 7:15-8:40–Will Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written," Papers We Love NYC, 2017

• 8:40-9:00–Informal paper discussion

// Papers

We're trying something different this month! We're going to do a watch party and discussion of one of the most popular past talks at the larger Papers We Love NYC meeting.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyfBQmvr2Hc

From the 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"