SICP

I got back from Wales on Tuesday, to find my copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (sometimes known as the Wizard book, or SICP, or "sickup", as I've taken to calling it) waiting for me. It's the first-year computer science textbook used at MIT, and early signs are that it's going to be worth its weight in rather good coffee.

( Chapter summary )

I've been working through the exercises, and I'm up to about page 70 (most of the way through Chapter 1). So far, there hasn't been anything really difficult, though a couple of the exercises require you to do Actual Experiments on a computer, and since, what with one thing and another, I don't have a working one at the moment (I'm typing this on wormwood_pearl's laptop), I haven't been able to do these. Some of the algorithms are new to me, and I've particularly enjoyed doing some programming with loop invariants (but how do you find them in the first place? Presumably there are techniques...), but it's hard to shake off the feeling that a lot of it is old hat; I've been programming computers for nearly twenty years, I'm no longer surprised by the concept of a data structure :-) I've enjoyed the philosophical and historical asides - if an algorithm dates back to ancient Egypt, they'll tell you which papyrus fragment it was found on - and the generally thoughtful and informed tone of the book. The progression from procedural to data-driven to metalinguistic programming reminds me of Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming, but this is surely not coincidence - like many expert Unix hackers, Eric was a Lisper first. totherme may be amused to learn that his old tutor, Joe Stoy, is a frequently-cited contributor :-)

¹Including some probabilistic algorithms - the ease with which one can roll a die in Lisp is not such a trivial matter :-)
²Plus ways of making change from a dollar or pound - I was amused to note that they haven't updated it to reflect the disappearance of the halfpenny :-)
³They're quite fond of the prefix "meta": for instance, they call an interpreter for language X written in language X a "metacircular interpreter", rather than just a circular one, for reasons which I can't quite fathom.

Gender theory question

Gender-theory kru, your attention please:

I came across the following recently, and wondered if any of you might have some idea of its source:

Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that corresponds to the conceptual mode, and consequently do not express precisely something in reality by which the intellect could be moved to conceive a thing the way it does, even where that motive is not something in the thing as such.

Any thoughts? And can someone tell me what it means?