Frame from Physics in Clojure - Colin Smith Plays with YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Physics in Clojure - Colin Smith

Open on YouTube First HN thread

2 HN users recommended this talk in 2 different months between 2019 and 2023.

2007–2026
2 recommendations 1 citation HackerTube score 2

Recommended as the best introduction to SICM and sicmutils and a showcase of what such symbolic systems can do.

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.

Pull quote: “The Strange Loop talk [3] is a good showcase of the power and simplicity of these kind of systems.” (HN, 2021)

Also tagged: symbolic classical mechanics, clojure, sicm, lagrangian mechanics, computer algebra, sicmutils

What Hacker News said

3 labeled comments from the HN archive; up to 20 are kept per video, favoring different commenters. Each one links back to the original thread.

Introduction to SICM and sicmutils.
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]
Showcases power and simplicity of SICM-style systems.
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]

Citations, criticism and jokes

Cites it erichocean December 2023 under Why Is Jepsen Written in Clojure?
Talk on SICM implementation 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]

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video in a list
Enter
Open the focused video
l
Like (on a video page)
w
Watch later (on a video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close