{"id":127,"date":"2008-08-28T11:59:59","date_gmt":"2008-08-28T18:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=127"},"modified":"2009-11-23T05:43:35","modified_gmt":"2009-11-23T12:43:35","slug":"oski-m-wizard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2008\/08\/28\/oski-m-wizard\/","title":{"rendered":"Oski M. Wizard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i><a href=\"http:\/\/mitpress.mit.edu\/sicp\/\" class=\"unemphasized\">Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs<\/a><\/i> is easily my favorite <acronym title=\"Computer Science\">CS<\/acronym> book (although I confess it is the only one I&#8217;ve actually read).  Its exercises happen to utilize characters named with double entendres: Alyssa P. Hacker (&#8220;a Lisp hacker&#8221;), Cy D. Fect (&#8220;side effect&#8221;), and Louis Reasoner (&#8220;loose reasoner&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>When I was a teaching assistant at Berkeley for its <i>SICP<\/i>-based course, I created my own character: Oski M. Wizard (&#8220;a Scheme wizard&#8221;).  The name was perfect since &#8220;Oski&#8221; is the name of U.C. Berkeley&#8217;s mascot, and <i>SICP<\/i> is also known as &#8220;the wizard book&#8221; due to its cover graphic.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, he never got much exposure.  I tried to get Professor Fateman to use him on one of his exams, but I think he didn&#8217;t understand the joke. (I probably should have pitched it to Professor Harvey instead.) At least I managed to use him <a href=\"http:\/\/www.csua.berkeley.edu\/~jameslin\/cs61a\/ddp-ex.txt\" class=\"unemphasized\">in some practice exercises I gave to my section<\/a> (which is more than I can say for another character I made, Sue D&#8217;Coda).<\/p>\n<p>Poor Oski.  And he so desperately wanted to impress Alyssa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is easily my favorite CS book (although I confess it is the only one I&#8217;ve actually read). Its exercises happen to utilize characters named with double entendres: Alyssa P. Hacker (&#8220;a Lisp hacker&#8221;), Cy D. Fect (&#8220;side effect&#8221;), and Louis Reasoner (&#8220;loose reasoner&#8221;). When I was a teaching assistant [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}