Physics in Clojure - Colin Smith
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as the best introduction to SICM and sicmutils and a showcase of what such symbolic systems can do.
What it is
Colin Smith introduces Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics and his Clojure port, sicmutils. He shows how higher-order functions and a symbolic algebra system can represent Lagrangian mechanics.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends ja-85 · 2019-04 · on “Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (2015)”
Thanks, this is a nice port! I worked through SICM using sicmutils as a backup. The MIT Scheme version sometimes "locked up" on my solutions to exercises and sicmutils did not (the Foucault pendulum problem comes to mind). This video is an introduction to SICM and sicmutils: [this video]
Recommends hcarvalhoalves · 2021-03 · on “Symbolics.jl: A Modern Computer Algebra System for a Modern Language”
Computer Algebra is criminally underused - it has the potential to make math-heavy critical-path code a lot more clear, testable, observable and bug-free by design. I feel I need to mention "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" by Wisdom and Sussman, and the accompanying "scmutils" library, which first implemented in Scheme many of the same features, although this Julia library seems to be more complete. There's also a great one-to-one port to Clojure by Colin Smith [2] in case you want to use it on a more production-friendly environment. The Strange Loop talk [3] is a good showcase of the power and simplicity of these kind of systems. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [this video]
Cites erichocean · 2023-12 · on “Why Is Jepsen Written in Clojure?”
> static typing helps everywhere I think "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" is a good example of the kind of software a dynamically-typed Lisp is superior at, beyond the usual suspects like SQL, R, Python, etc. Here's an example of SICM in Clojure: [LINK] And a talk about it's implementation here: [this video]