December 19, 2025
Applicative vs Normal Order Evaluation Chapter 1.1.5 is about substitution - comparing applicative-order evaluation and normal-order evaluation. It uses the following example, from the previous section:
1(define (f a) 2 (sum-of-squares (+ a 1) (* a 2))) There are two ways to evaluate this.
Applicative Order Evaluation Applicative-order evaluation means to evaluate the arguments before applying the procedure (or operator) to those arguments.
The body of the function is:
1(sum-of-squares (+ a 1) (* a 2)) If we were evaluating (f 5) we would substitute the argument 5 into the formal parameter a in the body of the function, giving us:
December 18, 2025
Refreshing Myself On the Basics I made some revisions this morning to how I’ll work through these exercises. Instead of running Racket in a Docker container, which was using way too much overhead, and taking forever to spin up, I just installed Racket directly on the VM and will run the Racket programs that way.
1sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y racket 2 3# install sicp package: 4raco pkg install --auto sicp 5 6# write racket program to do exercises 7vim exercises/chapter1-exercises.
December 17, 2025
Write For Your Life Yesterday my partner and I went to the thrift store to look for gifts for the kids. Inevitably I’m draw to the few rows of books. It’s so easy to get lost and let my my wander as I read through the titles, pulling some out that that sound, or look, interesting.
“Write For Your Life” by Anna Quindlen jumped out at me. I had never heard of it, or her, but the title sounded interesting.